(This will, somewhat surprisingly, eventually veer into men’s bodies and some man-on-man sex, recounted in street language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest; I’m sorry, but not even the best of Verdi opera and Italian tennis can quite counterbalance naked guys going at it with one another)
Today’s morning names were Rigoletto and Sinner, and for a change I knew exactly why they were in my head: Rigoletto is the name of an opera by Verdi (from which the magnificent quartet Bella figli dell’amore was playing on my music feed during my 2 am whizz break); and Sinner is the surname of someone who turns out to be an astoundingly famous Italian tennis player but was known to me only from a Sergio Scalise Facebook posting yesterday in which this Sinner was identified as a great champion who does commercials for De Cecco, Lavazza, and La Roche — I am, famously, deeply ignorant of sports; and also, despite Sergio’s occasional attempts at educating me, neglectfully ignorant of matters social, cultural, and political in today’s Italy (I’m not merely not au courant, but actually inert). This is Jannik Sinner; I had never laid eyes on him until this morning (I’ve been entertained by a recent Lavazza commercial, but it’s one for the American audience and doesn’t have Jannik Sinner in it). I go on at such length about JS because my readers from or connected to Italy will find it impossible to believe that I had no idea who Sinner — that athletic and cultural phenom — is.
Now, the coming program: about Rigoletto, briefly; about Jannik Sinner, at greater length, with a note about Lavazza coffee commercials; a side note about Google searches; and then a raunchy digression on the Italian jobs of the title.
Start with the two Italian things — jobbies — from my morning names ([slang] noun jobbie ‘an object or product of a specified kind’ (NOAD)):
First Italian jobbie: Rigoletto. From my 3/18/25 posting “Morning name: barramundi”:
it was through Rigoletto — the quartet Bella figli dell’amore, specifically, which I saw performed on some culture-vulture show on tv as a kid (of 9 or 10) and had my socks blown off by — that I came to Verdi, eventually discovering that the opera also, astonishingly, had Caro nome, La donna è mobile, and … Si vendetta in it.
Second Italian jobbie: Sinner. From Sergio Scalise yesterday:
E’ da un po’ che penso che Sinner sia troppo ‘esposto’: e pasta De Cecco, e caffè Lavazza e La Roche…
Anche per lui, pur sempre grande campione, vale dunque il detto ‘auri sacra fames’…
In English translation:
I’ve been thinking for a while that Sinner is too “exposed”: De Cecco pasta, and Lavazza coffee and La Roche[-Posay skincare products]…
Even for him, always a great champion, the saying auri sacra fame [‘accursed hunger for gold’, from the Aeneid — a reference to Sinner’s enormous number of remunerative sponsorship deals] is valid…
From Wikipedia:
Jannik Sinner (born 16 August 2001) is an Italian professional tennis player. He is currently ranked as the world No. 1 in men’s singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the first Italian to reach the top ranking.
(#1) Jannik Sinner (photo: AFP / Fayez Nureldine)… Jannik Sinner was born … to Hanspeter and Siglinde Sinner in Innichen in the province of South Tyrol in Northern Italy. His mother tongue is German. [AMZ: he also speaks English]
… At age 17, Sinner signed sponsorship deals with Nike and Head in 2019 for tennis footwear, apparel, and equipment In 2020, when he was eighteen years old and not yet in the top 50 of the ATP rankings, Sinner signed a global ambassador contract with Rolex. In October that year, when he was ranked no. 46, he signed a sponsorship contract with Alfa Romeo. In 2021, he signed with Intesa Sanpaolo. In 2022, Sinner signed a new $150 million sponsorship contract with Nike spanning ten years and became the face of Gucci and Lavazza. In 2023, Sinner signed a partnership with Formula 1 to help attract young diverse audience to the motorsport. In 2024, L’Oréal’s skincare brand La Roche-Posay appointed Sinner as their global brand advocate to help raise awareness about sun protection. Some of his other sponsors include FASTWEB, De Cecco, Panini Comics, Technogym, Enervit, Parmigiano Reggiano, and Pigna.
Here’s his Lavazza commercial, a comic riff on making commercials: YouTube video here. JS definitely has a talent for this sort of thing. The Lavazza US commercial “La Dolce Vita” features Steve Carell and John Krasinski with a robot named Luigi: YouTube video here.
Side note: the Google search. Yesterday, a Google (AI-guided) search on “Sinner” got endless stuff on the 2025 film Sinners and only that; apparently, once it found that, it stopped searching for anything more. Eventually, I discovered that I needed to use “Sinner Lavazza” (or something similar) to get to JS sites. (My work on other postings, especially a second Haj Ross posting, was seriously impeded by such search behavior.)
And then, of course, today a search on “Sinner” got JS right away, as the first site, but with Sinners sites as well. It all seems to depend on the phase of the moon.
Italian jobs. Like writing operas or playing tennis (and hawking goods). But there are other senses of job that could be at play here, as in my 1/23/22 posting “Sexy Italians”, which started with the 1900 painting Italian Man with a Rope by John Singer Sargent and went on to the Italian-Australian Cristiano Lorenzi in Sydney, displaying himself flagrantly on Twitter:
(#2) Sargent’s Italian man at work
(#3) Lorenzi, also at work. selling himself on-line
I wrote in that posting:
[I was led] to thinking of [these two Italian male models] as Italian jobs, (hot) Italian guys, and to wonder whether Italian job had been used as slang for ‘hand job’ (or some other sexual act), Italians being popularly depicted as both sexually desirable and sexually hyperactive. That led me to a 16th and 17th century use of Italian to refer to engaging in the practice of anal intercourse — it seems to have been supposed to be an abominable Italian as well as a Greek vice — and to Italian lavoretto, literally ‘little job’, with a variety of slang uses, including (I read in a Quora response) ‘quickie sex’, especially fellatio.
And of course to the delightful 1969 British comedy caper film, The Italian Job. (Going even further afield, to the fact that where I grew up, submarine sandwiches, or subs, were commonly referred to as Italian sandwiches, or very crudely (but more assonantly) wop jobs. So that if I say I’m looking for a wop job, I might merely be in the market for a big sandwich, or I might imaginably be asking to get fucked à la Baroque, sucked off in a moment, or just jacked off.)