#venetian nico

[losergender]

"nico di angelo would lose his ability to speak venetian after bianca dies" is a very understandable headcanon but minoritarian languages losing speakers makes me very sad so i personally choose to think nico raises venetian ghosts to practice his venetian from time to time and make sure he doesn't lose it.

[nicohate]

rick riordan making nico venetian is so funny actually

[butt-puncher]

Nico is good at glass blowing

[cocrante]

I find it really canon that Nico is unable to speak English properly when he's angry. It's a sentiment I understand and share, especially now

And I'll add my own headcanon:

not only Nico is unable to speak English well when is angry, but he doesn't even speak Italian. Instead, he switches to the Venetian dialect, which consists of a circuit of curses aimed at catching the attention of our vast and personal pantheon of Angels and Saints

[yunyun-soso]

More Niccolò di Angelo content

nico di angelo: nico who is actually niccolò, a name he uses rarely, quietly, carefully. something not everyone can say, nor grasp the importance of. niccolò di angelo, son of an italian woman, brother of an italian girl, grandson of an italian man and diplomat: blood as red and vibrant as caravaggio’s death of the virgin flows through his veins, his complexion carries the faint memory of olives and the liquid they produce, a memory of where he comes from, of home. niccolò: a name of most significant power and presence, owned by many before him. before niccolò di angelo there was niccolò “ugo” foscolo, before niccolò foscolo there was niccolò machiavelli: a legacy of writers, poets who made history with the sole movement of their hand holding a quill. he, too, will carry their memory, spread his word about the generations that led to his existence. he will see the sun shining bright in the sky and bask in the light and warmth it brings, because who is he if he doesn’t appreciate the pieces of home that follow him wherever he goes? he will look at the night sky and think of galileo, of leopardi’s poems, and he will remember the loud laughter of his mamma and the tight embraces of his nonna. he will make food for his loved ones with all the passion and affection his heart can carry and, for an instant, be brought back to that one tiny, hidden street, now long forgotten, in venice, where his home once stood, and in that instant he will reminisce and smile at the consciousness that he carries his own bloodline and origins with him, always.

[nicodisigma]

solangelo headcanons part 11!

Will, as child of Apollo, is as scared of snakes as children of Athena are scared of spiders. He absolutely PANICS.

Nico is very protective of his boyfriend and his instincts always make him grab Will or cover Will with his body whenever some danger occurs.

Once Apollo visited camp and Nico didn’t know about it. He mistook Apollo for Will and he threw his arms around Apollo’s neck. Nico had never been this embarrassed before (Apollo didn’t even realize that this was a mistake).

Will is always mentioned by campers as #1 example of demigods taking after their godly parents. He’s VERY similar to his father. And everyone at CHB knows that the Naomi Solace is ginger, not blond. So him taking after Apollo is very obvious and visible especially that Apollo shows up at camp way more often than other gods.

Nico on the other hand doesn’t seem to inherit any features from his godly parent, as Maria di Angelo also had dark hair and dark eyes, just like Hades. His face also doesn’t evoke associations with his father.

Nico does speak the venetian language (dialect), and he’s as natural with it as with italian, so he’s referring to english as his 3rd language!

[losersolace]

nico’s transition from calling will “significant annoyance” to “boyfriend” is great BUT calling him “il mio ragazzo” or even better the dialect “me moroso” is so important to me !! even though idk who’d speak in venetian with him lol but can you IMAGINE getting to call someone the same gender as you your partner, in the same language you first heard that same thing was a sin and then never heard again after that? the first language you were ever insulted in, because of who you are?

[delicate-sketch]

Carnevale di Venezia

Because I think it's a crime Nico being a venetian and having between none to nothing fanarts being extra and wearing a costume

[etheriaolympics]

thinking about how nico probably only speaks in a venetian dialect (and one from pre wwii) so realistically anyone from camp who knows italian probably struggles to understand him and i think that’s kinda funny

[losergender]

nico di angelo whose mother tongue is not italian but actually vèneto/venetian is so important to me!!! (am i italian? no! but i am a linguistics student who also speaks a minoritized romance language). he usually speaks italian at camp bc he associates venetian with his family, but he always counts in venetian, he reads numbers in venetian, stuff like days of the week and basic vocabulary too. will picks up an italian A1 textbook one, sees 50% of the basic stuff doesn't match with what nico says and decides that his boyfriend just uses a very outdated lexic, or maybe he forgot the language, or maybe it has something to do with dyslexia. obviously chiara from cabin 19 is the first one to find out that the boy is simply a polyglot (venetian, italian, english + ancient greek) but she delays on telling will because watching him struggle to understand the situation is hilarious

[ripeindecember]

A collection of Will and Nico headcanons I want to use in fics, but they've been hanging out in my drafts so long that they'll probably never see the light of day

•Nico doesn’t speak what is broadly referred to as Italian nowadays, per se. Based on Rick's (albeit sloppy and contrary) timeline, the Di Angelo's end up in DC right before the US enters the war (they get there winter of 1939 iirc,) and Nico is 10 when they come out of the Lotus, so he's probably born sometime in 1928-29. (Probably '29, based on the January birthday.) He's born pretty early into Mussolini's forced “Italification” process (About 1925). All that being said (especially with the fact that the Di Angelos made it out of Italy and to the states under Mussolini.) I think there's a pretty substantial possibility that what Nico speaks is pre-fascist unification Venetian, not the broader Italian.  (He's learning the modern language, though. He and Will go to some sandwich place in New Jersey or wherever, and he orders in his first language because he recognizes some of the stuff the cooks are yelling. The grey haired guy at the register stares at him like he has a third eye and says, “Kid, why do you talk like my granny?” He's flabbergasted. Will is delighted.) 

•Will has Czech ancestry. There's a Czech diaspora in the Texas Hill Country, and their initial immigration was a huge building block in the creation of Central Texas culture. (I know he's described as having no musical talent, but I think it would be funny if he gets an accordion in his hands at some point and figures out he can totally rip with it, and he calls his mom and is like “why this” and Naomi is like “Have I never told you about your great-great-grandmother?)

•Will ends up getting like. The most fuckass youth-pastor “I walked into a tattoo shop and asked for tattoos” tattoos after the sun. I love my boy, I do, but something about him gives off that vibe. Like he gets one of those forest growing up around the wrist tattoos or something. Bands around the bicep, calligraphy on the collarbones, yellow rose on his thigh kinda thing. He gets tattoos like he’s the 3rd member of the Chainsmokers. (Nico does not know that they are lame, because he is 96 years old. He thinks Will and his tattoos are sooooo cool.)

•In a similar vein, this is also how Will dresses. When he’s not wearing scrubs he’s wearing like, a cutoff NASA shirt that he’s owned for 6 years, basketball shorts, and sandals with socks. On the other hand, once he’s able to finally go shopping for himself, the way Nico dresses shifts wildly. Suddenly he’s wearing collard shirts with sweaters over them, and turtlenecks tucked into dark, straight-cut jeans, instead of overly baggy t-shirts. (The jacket stays, though, and so do the boots that Will put stickers all over for him.) (“What’s the occasion?” Jason asks him, referring to a new outfit the first time, and Nico is bewildered and kind of like “What? I’m just not dressing out of the garbage anymore?” and Jason goes “…What?” and learns that for the past few years Nico’s been stealing his clothes out of donation boxes and trashcans and that the beat-up look wasn’t like a purposeful aesthetic, and he feels his heart break a bit.)

•Most animals don't like Nico. You know what does? Pigs. Those things are brutal. They'll eat anything, including humans, so Nico's "death aura" just kind of smells like food. They figure this out while at a farm for some reason, and the pigs start following them around. Will asks Nico to summon a zombie to scare them off, and they just eat it. One of the pigs bumps its head against Nico's hand like a dog. ("Oh gods." "You made a friend, Ni!") (They get a guinea hog when they move in together. They name it after Hestia, who thinks it's hilarious.)

•Capture the flag day is always bad. You know what’s worse? SEC football season. Southern campers raised in college sport culture are bloodthirsty. The week that UT plays A&M, Jason, Piper, Kayla, and Nico have a strategy meeting about how to keep Leo and Will away from each other. Otherwise, they start hurling some of the worst insults and physical violence that either side has ever resorted to, outside of the actual wars. (Once, instead of flipping them off when Nico and Will were putting Leo in prison during capture the flag, Leo had shot Will an upside-down hand symbol that Nico didn’t understand. Nico had watched with wide eyes as Will cocked an eyebrow and jabbed Leo in a pressure-point that made him collapse on the ground. “What was that?” “Justice.”)   (Also, not super relevant, but Connor Stoll tours USC so he has an excuse to wear a shirt that reads “COCKS” for a week without getting in trouble.) 

•Nico is slowly gains freckles and beauty spots as his olive skin tone returns/his tan deepens. At some point, they notice that there are a lot more concentrated on one half of his body, (On his cheek, the side of his nose, down his face, on his arm) and they can’t figure out why. Eventually, they’re talking about it sitting in bed, and they shrug it off and lay down. Will goes “Oh, my gods,” and they realize because of the way they sleep, Nico is getting more freckles on one side of his body because he’s basically getting ambient sun exposure on half of his body from sleeping on top of Will every night. (“Why didn’t you tell me that you’re a human tanning bed!” “I didn’t know! You’re the one who’s trying to sleep inside my chest!”) 

[thetrashthatsmilesback]

Nico should actually speak Venetian, not Italian, but he DOES speak Italian, so headcanon that Nico and Bianca were raised trilingual (as opposed to bilingual which is technically canon).

Canon: raised speaking English and Italian

My theory: raised speaking Venetian, Italian, and English

Also, I am aware that Venetian is often referred to as a dialect rather than a distinct language, but many linguists today do consider it a distinct language.

The bbc link is attached above but here's some more about Venetan

https://www.omniglot.com/writing/venetian.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20140827110429if_/http://www.linguasphere.info/lcontao/tl_files/pdf/master/OL-SITE%201999-2000%20MASTER%20ONE%20Sectors%205-Zones%2050-54.pdf

https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/vene1258 (glottolog my beloved, I had to use this site so much for my linguistics class)

https://brill.com/display/book/9789004252523/B9789004252523_027.xml (I plan on seeing if I can access this book in full through my school, but the preview is concise)

[lucius-i-ran]

I know that Nico is venetian and that's wonderful!! love it!! I love Veneto BUT

could you imagine southern italian Nico?

Because I can. I can imagine:

Nico calling his loved ones local nicknames. I can totally imagine a neapolitan Nico calling his friends "uagliò" or "nenné" (which is like "dude" in neapolitan, both can be used normally or as a warning) or calling Will or Hazel "perzechella" (which means "peach" in neapolitan) as a term of endearment; an apulian Nico calling "muccusu" (which is little kid but as an insult) Leo if he was having beef with him on the Argo II or being called that himself by Bianca in a siblings bicker; or a sicilian Nico calling Percy "facc'i pichira" (literally, "ray fish face").

Or Nico being obsessed with opera because Maria always took him and Bianca to the Saint Charles theatre in Naples.

Or Nico knowing how to dance taranta or pizzica and being called to those rhythms even though he doesn't know why (those are respectively an Apulian and Campania's folk dance - if you don't know campania is where Naples and Pompeii are situated).

Or Nico very easily understanding/learing spanish, turkish and/or arabic because sicilian, being influenced by those populations throughout history, is very similar to those languages (especially spanish).

Or Nico inherently knowing how to make certain kinds of pasta, very swiftly because of the country fairs where older folks set up stands in the streets and make pasta, in honour of a local festivity or a local patron (very popular thing in southern italy especially Apulia).

anyway, this is a rant more than anything that I had to get out of my sistem bcs I have nothing to do and it's your problem.

stan fratm in cristo Nico di Angelo

[goddessofwisdom18]

no thoughts head empty just nico being venetian and jason being roman

[moonieloves]

nico the italian speaker

so i was talking to a friend about whether nico speaks italian or not and these are the conclusions we reached.

would have nico spoken italian when he first got to the us? yes, of course he would have. i feel like maria di angelo would have put a lot of weight into carrying on with traditions, and all that stuff. up until this point, italian is all nico ever knew. somebody might argue about him speaking venetian dialect, which i think is highly likely, but the point is sometimes the language in which lullabies were sung to us sticks. once you call the person that gave birth to you 'mamma' the first time, you don't really change it up.

did bianca speak italian? obviously. i also think that she would have been taken by the american dream quicker than her other family members, and she would have been the one to speak english with nico the most.

the lotus casino must have been were nico really learnt english, i reckon. before that, there always was someone to talk to in italian if he felt too lazy to express his feeling in this other, strange-sounding idom. now, though, there's no one else, and bianca sometimes slips up but she mostly sticks to english. the occasional italian word sometimes comes up in conversation when they can't remember what the correspective in english is, but that's about it. bianca wants them to adapt, and adapt nico does.

by the time they get to westover, nico has mostly forgotten how to speak italian, even though he still understands pretty much everything. even when bianca talks to him in italian, he answers in english. maybe he lost the ability to speak italian too quickly for it to be normal, but he's like ten, and not aware at all that he spent the last eighty years practicing his english with strangers in front of vintage video games. he really doesn't care, he just knows that this new sparkly world that is revealing itself in front of him speaks english in a nonchalant, given-for-granted way, and so he tries to do the same.

bianca was literally the only other person that even knows he supposedly speaks a whole other language. when she dies, everything wipes itself out. it hurts too much to remember how her voice sounded a bit deeper in italian than it did in english, and so he forgets it all together, along with his own ability to understand italian. the memory stays, but now that her words don't make sense in his head anymore, not really, he doesn't have to feel pain pulse inside his ribs that badly.

oh, it still frustrates him sometimes. sometimes, he won't remember how to name a certain object in italian, nor in english, and he is left to angrily sputter around. sometimes he can't wrap his mouth around the pronunciation of a certain word, because he just learned to do things another way even if he doesn't really remember. his english vocabulary could really use some improving, and his italian vanishes a bit more every day. but by the time hoo happens, i'd say, most of his accent has washed out, and he sounds properly american now. for the most part. he still dreams in italian sometimes, even if he doesn't understand half of it, and maria di angelo will always be 'mamma' in his head.

[sisididis]

Bianca and Nico di Angelo’s story is equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious, because imagine this. You are two Venetian children (aged 12 and 10 respectively) who don’t speak a lick of English yet you’re dropped off in the middle of 1930s Las Vegas. Although it feels like only 2 months have passed since your arrival, you and your sibling unknowingly spend 70 years in an atemporal limbo known as Lotus Hotel Casino. You learn English by playing tabletop games, bingo, ring toss, slots…even Mythomagic.

When you think about it, Bianca and Nico learned to speak English the same way 2010s kids learned by watching Pewdiepie and Markiplier on Youtube.