Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An Italian strolling musician who plays the piffero.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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In every city where Art is practised there are old gentlemen who never touched a pencil in their lives, but find the occupation and company of artists so agreeable that they are never out of the studios; follow one generation of painters after another; sit by with perfect contentment while Jack is drawing his pifferaro, or Tom designing his cartoon, and years afterwards when
The Newcomes 2006
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His father is in the patriarchal line: he has himself done the cherubs, the shepherd-boys, and now is a grown man, and ready as a warrior, a pifferaro, a capuchin, or what you will.
The Newcomes 2006
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Besides, the true _pifferaro_ wears his costume as if it belonged to him and had always been worn by him, -- so that it has none of that got-up look which spoils everything.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859 Various
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She had lived with her father and sister in a queer old-fashioned, expatriated, artistic Bohemia, in the days when the aesthetic was only the academic and the painters who knew the best models for a contadina and pifferaro wore peaked hats and long hair.
The Aspern Papers 1888
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Oh, the queer sense of the good old Capri of artistic legend, of which the name itself was, in the more benighted years -- years of the contadina and the pifferaro -- a bright evocation!
Italian Hours Henry James 1879
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She had lived with her father and sister in a queer old-fashioned, expatriated, artistic Bohemia, in the days when the aesthetic was only the academic and the painters who knew the best models for a contadina and pifferaro wore peaked hats and long hair.
The Aspern Papers Henry James 1879
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In every city where Art is practised there are old gentlemen who never touched a pencil in their lives, but find the occupation and company of artists so agreeable that they are never out of the studios; follow one generation of painters after another; sit by with perfect contentment while Jack is drawing his pifferaro, or Tom designing his cartoon, and years afterwards when Jack is established in Newman
The Newcomes William Makepeace Thackeray 1837
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a warrior, a pifferaro, a capuchin, or what you will.
The Newcomes William Makepeace Thackeray 1837
knitandpurl commented on the word pifferaro
Also a style of hat in the late 1870s: per the Berg Dictionary of Fashion History it's a "hat with a short, chimney-pot crown trimmed with an aigrette in front."
July 10, 2012
knitandpurl commented on the word pifferaro
"Biffy was a man of principle. He refused, on principle, to sell a huge tricolored pifferaro bonnet decorated with a cascade of clove pinks, black currants, and cut jet beads to Mrs. Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher for her daughter."
Timeless by Gail Carriger, p 18
July 11, 2012