Fare un giro pesca.

Since the construction works started for the new trams, whenever people from Florence have to go somewhere, they use the expression ‘fare un giro pesca’! Do you know what this way of saying typical of the lily city means? Perhaps you will have guessed it from the example: it means making a long, tortuous and complicated and useless trip, because in the end you return to the starting point! Not only by extension, ‘fare un giro pèsca’ would also mean acting in a dodgy and dishonest way.

So, where does this expression come from? As it often happens with folks’ sayings, we must resort to conjectures. It could derive not so much from pèsca, the peach fruit, but from pésca (i.e. fishing) so from the activity of catching fish. Fishing means in fact to catch randomly or draw lots. In this sense it would mean starting a journey by going at random, trying to guess the right direction. A ‘vattelappesca’ trip in the sense of a trip made ‘fishing’ the various alternatives at random. We know it, in time of web surfers all this might seem really strange, especially to the youngest!

Another explanation of the way of saying could depend on a past custom when at county fairs there was always a 'wheel of fortune', which in Italian is called a fishing wheel: you pushed it to make it turn and according to the number that was indicated by the appropriate dial you could win something. Once again, the idea of randomness returns which at this point seems to us the common denominator of all possible explanations of this way of saying.

What do you think... have we done a giro pesca to explain it or did you understand it? If you want to practice with the Tuscan dialect and with its funny ways of saying, the only solution, however, is to go to the place and listen to the nice talking of Florentines, Sienese and Pisans! Book our tours among the villages of Tuscany and you will have the opportunity to listen to many different ways of saying like the one we have just talked to you about.