How a Hebrew Word Made Its Way into the Speech of a Remote Italian Village

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Several years ago, my friend Yisra’el Leshman bought a hillside house in the village of Traversella in the Piedmont region of Italy, near the French and Swiss borders some 50 kilometers north of Turin. The house had been abandoned and was not in a habitable state, but Leshman is a handy type. Since then, he’s been fixing the place up whenever he can find the time for it. One of these days or years, he assures me, it will be a first-rate vacation home.

A while back I ran into him and he had something interesting to tell me. “You know,” he said, “the house I bought was originally just a summer place. In the past, many families in Traversella built houses on the hill above the village and moved to them every summer in order to pasture their cattle there. The older villagers speak a local dialect that I don’t understand, which is why their word for such a house only recently came to my attention. They call it a bayta.” He pronounced the first, stressed vowel as in the English word “by.” “What do you think of that?”