All over the world the surname Balanzin (written this way) identifies a small number of people. It’s a rare surname. In Italy, most of them live in the north, a few in the center, none in the south. At least, that's what the few data available say.
Our father was a very skilled craftsman. Retired, by heart he had built to perfect scale a farm cart. One of those he had come to know as a kid and, later on, to build as a young carpenter apprentice. He had built the model without spending a cent, using only available materials from our basement, which was also his little workshop. The wood cuttings came from there; the metal to circle the wheels from an old tin can, cut into strips. He had transformed nails, screws and even parts of pressure bolts to obtain what was needed to build the hubs, the cranks that control the brakes, the loops that hold the uprights of the sides. For the brass-plated chain, he had borrowed it from our mother.
The tone is given by linseed oil;the red color, from a paint left in the bottom of a can from a previous job, but corresponding exactly, by gradation, to what he remembered, going with the memory to his youth. Dad had secured a little peace of shaped wood, so that it wouldn't get lost, using the ring fit in the center of it, to one of the two hooks that had screwed to the front of the wagon, right above the wheels. Speaking in a very low voice, as if revealing a secret, holding it tight between index finger and thumb, like a match, he had whispered: "... and this is the balanzin". Balanzin's balanzin is that stick you see in the photo grid above (bottom line, right).
Dad's ancestors came from the Vicenza area, in Veneto. From a small village in the foothills. From there, in a time that he could not place, his people had moved, peasants, to Istria; there he was born, in a house overlooking the valley; from Istria they were displaced to Italy, refugees, after the Second World War.
There are also other devices that are called balanzin: in some dialects of Lombardy and Piedmont, balanzin identifies a pulley device (if I understand correctly, but I can't guarantee) equipped with two baskets or chests. In small construction sites it is used to lift, by means of ropes, any load to those who work at different hight. And in another Lombard dialect it seems to identify a tool used by workers in quarries. I say it seems, because I have found an explanation written only in the dialect in question. Impenetrable, for me. However, everybody who is able to understand the Cusian dialect, spoken in the area of Lake Orta, can read here.
The greatest concentration of Balanzin, in Italy, is found in Friuli Venezia Giulia and in particular in Trieste. Then in the Veneto. Some units also in Lombardy, Piedmont, Tuscany, Lazio, Romagna. We have known those from Romagna well: our family. Mom and dad came from the same village in Istria. Now, they rest side by side in a country cemetery overlooking the hills. So similar to those, forever out of reach, in which they were born.
