My father occasionally remembered a relative from the island of Cres in Croatian or Cherso in Italian who was famous for a prominent nose. Girolamo Bon was his name. To the best of my understanding of my genealogy, he was an uncle of my great-grandfather from Istria. Anyhow, he was once asked why he was rarely seen in the church. “I don’t like it,” he explained, “because they all exclaim ‘o che naso’ whenever they see me!” What a nose, that is. This was a joke on the Croatian language, for the people in church were actually saying “oče naš,” or “our father” in Croatian. The Venetians in the region must have been mightily annoyed by the rise of national fervor among Croatians that started in the mid-Nineteenth Century. The abandonment of Latin in churches must have been quite a blow for them, too. Whence o che naso, no doubt. Old Girolamo must have longed for the glorious language of his ancestors: “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra…”