Prendere Una Toppa
About a month ago I set up a Google alert for my last name, Toppa. I was thinking it’d be a fun way to see what other Toppas out there are up to. It’s a rare name (outside of Newport RI anyway), and so far every Toppa I’ve encountered has at least some distant family relationship. It looks like the “other” Mike Toppa is doing well in the world of yachting - here’s a profile of him.
I quickly learned that I needed to modify the alert to exclude anything that also mentioned “tengen.” Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is a Japanese anime series that apparently has a devoted following, as people are out there blogging about it like crazy. It turns out that Toppa means “breakthrough” in Japanese.
Toppa is an Italian name, but until now I didn’t know if it had any particular meaning. In my latest Google alert, I discovered there’s not only a restaurant in Italy bearing the family name - Trattoria La Toppa - but that it also has a, um, rather interesting meaning:
After our day’s sightseeing, we eschewed the hotel’s fine cuisine for a real Italian treat, an al fresco dinner at a trattoria called La Toppa, in the ancient village of San Donato In Poggio. It was a five-course feast, prepared by a family of cooks using recipes handed down the generations.
La Toppa is derived from the Italian expression “prendere una toppa”. It means “to get drunk”.
And lastly, if you visit Guiseppe Silvestrini’s site, you can listen to - and download the sheet music for - a polka called “La Toppa” (it’s the 8th one on the list).
