An Ashe Connection?

Lacking tube socks and short shorts only because of shoddy weather, I entered Tourist Mode full-swing this week: It’s la Settimana della Cultura! This is a fantastic idea . . . Well done, Italy! (USA, Buffalo: Grab a notebook.) To promote tourism by tourists in non-tourist season, and to promote tourism by “locals,” the Italian Ministry of Culture sponsors a Culture Week every spring. Not only are all museums free, but there are all kinds of special events, shows, movies, lectures, and “extraordinary openings” of, say, your local Medieval palace. Wanting to take full advantage, and lured by the promise of show about Chocolate (I do study Alimentation . . . ) I spent a full day today in Modena. (Incidentally, I recently learned that the Italian word for "tube socks" is "tubolari." Excellent word.)

• There was a cool exhibit of 1850s photographs from Rome; I feel like I have a kind of special connection with Rome (maybe everyone ever enchanted by Rome does?), and it’s amazing how much the photos, from a hundred and fifty years ago, of a city I lived in for a month, made me feel “at home.”
• I stumbled into a public library and found a map from when the world was still flat. And a couple of beautiful thousand-year-old illuminated books. Doesn’t it sound crazy that you can “stumble upon” these things?
• And then there was the chocolate show. It wasn’t chocolate, per se. It was chocolate represented in little advertisement cards from the last hundred, two hundred years. There have been some pretty cool ads through the years . . .

But here’s the interesting possibility of the day. Modena was the seat of the Italian branch of the d’Este dynasty, which had plenty of other top dogs scattered across Europe. When I got into Ashe family history a few years ago, I remember reading a theory that the origins of the Ashe name came from French d’Este immigrants fleeing . . . something. I can’t remember, exactly: it’s jumbled against the theory of a Spanish shipwreck off the coast of Kerry (though I think was more of an ambitious explanation for being the stereotypical “Black Irish”) and the rather more probable suggestion that it had something to do with an ash tree (though, in fact, the Irish word for an ash of the tree type is fuinseog). In any case, this idea of the French d’Este connection, having hibernated in the dormant-neuron compartment of my brain for the last ten years, was re-awakened upon seeing the d’Este portraits in Modena. My first thought: That’s an Ashe forehead! Not that we have a monopoly on the “extraordinarily tall forehead plus pronounced widow’s peak” style, but, you have to admit, it is pretty distinctive. And, what do you know?! Check out these two d’Este foreheads.

I think it's conclusive. I'm writing immediately to claim my inheritance.