2026-06-14 08:00:00
Recently my wife and I took a two-day trip to Veneto, wanting to discover the place our families came from when they emigrated to Brazil around 150 years ago. We didn’t have a tight plan, just a list of towns and surnames, but that was more than enough for a good time.
It ended up being a very enriching trip, with lots of history, beautiful landscapes and cemeteries.
Our first stop was in Bassano del Grappa, after a 3-hour drive. This one has no relation to our family, but it’s a really nice town which we had visited before and wanted to see again. We crossed the Ponte Vecchio, a historic landmark that was first built in 1209, but has been destroyed and rebuilt many times since then.
The most recent destruction is the most memorable: in 1945, a group of Partisans (anti-fascist militias) blew up the bridge as part of a plan to hinder Nazi logistics in the region and, as a result, stop the town of Bassano from being bombed. Some of them were executed by the Nazis as retaliation, and today there’s a plaque on the bridge paying homage to them.
We had lunch, then walked around in the town center, passing through the old castle and the two main town squares.
This town is just outside Bassano and is where the Mazzochini (my mother’s side of the family) came from, though it was spelled Mazzochin back then.
Sadly, not much to show from this one. We didn’t see much from the town itself and only found a couple of Mazzochin names in the cemetery, which was not enough to build a better picture of what life was like back there.
We got back in the car for a 45min drive towards our next destination.
Seren was the birthplace of the Fantinel family — or at least the branch that emigrated to Brazil and ended up with me in it. The drive there was beautiful, with the road nestled in a valley between the mountains with a great view of the Dolomites.
The town itself is tiny but really charming. The buildings are well kept and the church tower is quite a sight. On the horizon, you can see the pointy Dolomites and I now realize that liking mountains runs in the family.
We parked our car at the town entrance and walked for about 15min to the town’s cemetery, passing houses with open gardens and plantations along the way. People seemed pretty curious about the two strangers wandering through.
In the cemetery, we found a handful of Fantinel graves, but the real surprise was that it felt like 80% of the surnames there were either Scopel or Rech — two family names that are really easy to find back in Serra Gaúcha, where I come from. We even found a plaque around town with a QR Code that supposedly led you through the story of the Scopel family’s migration to Brazil, but sadly the website it took us to is currently under maintenance. It’d have been cool to hear the story of the migration from the side of those who stayed rather than the other way around.
To close out the day, we drove about 15 minutes to Feltre, a somewhat larger town in the same area. We had booked a night in a nice villa around there, but before bed we took a walk around town.
Turns out Feltre has a genuine somewhat-well-preserved medieval town center! It’s in the less lived-in walled area of the town, which sits on top of a hill, around which modern Feltre later grew. I read that the walls and most of the buildings inside it were built in the 16th century, after the previous town was destroyed in a war (Feltre itself has been a town since at least 49 BC).
The night walk was a vibe. There wasn’t a single living soul in the streets, and as it was getting dark, there were only a few spots with artificial light to set the mood. There was a biking event going on nearby with music, but it was distant enough not to be a distraction.
We also found out that there’s a yearly competition in town called Palio di Feltre. Four houses compete in things like archery, horse racing, and tug of war. The flag of last year’s winning house was displayed in the town square.
We returned to our Airbnb to spend the night, and in the morning had a chat with the hostess while having our colazione. She mentioned knowing a lot of Fantinel people in town, which, after seeing a bunch of gravestones with the Fantinel name in Feltre’s cemetery, pretty much confirms that region as the home of some of my ancestors.
Before leaving, we decided to return to see the castle area during the day. So we climbed the hill and got inside the walls again. It wasn’t as dramatic as it was at night, but it was still cool to see it all in real life. Being on top of a hill also meant there were some great views all around, too.
We had one last stop in mind before going home: the origins of the Stella family, which is my wife’s surname (and which I proudly added to my name when we got married). While we were on our way though, we passed through a beautiful stretch of road that looked way too familiar.
We found out later that it’s a path called the Prosecco Road; Italy’s oldest designated wine route, where apparently “the area is known for its family-run wineries and traditional winemaking methods”. Huh, sounds familiar.
Going through that road brought up some emotions due to how similar it is to some of the roads in Serra Gaúcha, my home. A lot of that region was colonized by the Veneto immigrants and they built things the way they knew how. That, plus the similar geography (sans Dolomites) explains why the landscapes are so similar.
I couldn’t help thinking about how curious it is that 150 years ago people left this place in search of a better life and ended up building somewhere so similar — a place I would eventually call home.
When we got to the home of the Stella family, we were surprised by how big the town was (at least in comparison to the others we’d been in). The church was huge and incredibly ornate; and it’s the very church where my wife’s ancestor was baptized. We even saw the baptism-bowl-thingy by the entrance!
We also found out that Stella is a huuuuge family there. Just like the Scopel were in Seren, Stella looks like one of the most common surnames in Pieve. We found out that there’s a Cardinal Stella in town, we found out that there were Stella who were victims in both World Wars (one of them a Partisan who was captured), both commemorated in monuments there, and in the cemetery there were too many Stella to count.
After a while in the city of stars¹, we started the drive back home, a fortunately uneventful trip.
When we planned our trip to Veneto, we were expecting a chill outing but had no big ambitions. But it turned out to be a really interesting one! We learned a lot of history, discovered places we never would have otherwise, and were able to connect more to the history of our families.
As immigrants ourselves, it’s enriching to find out more about the immigrants we descended from, too. I’m really grateful for what they did many generations ago and for giving me the opportunity to be born in Brazil. I’m also sure they missed their home a lot, just like I miss mine.
1 - Stella literally means “star” in Italian. Ba dum tss
2026-06-03 18:10:30
by Brendon Bigley & Pablo Marti Cordero
This is so good! Overworld is a gaming news aggregator that is actually usable. It groups together all news for a single topic under a single headline, and also curates gaming-related stuff (that’s not necessarily news) in a “worth your time” section. And it looks great too!
2026-05-31 08:00:00
Hey there! I hope the month of May has treated you well. Here in Italy we are (hopefully) at the tail end of a major heatwave that has made life a tiny bit worse for me; I never lived anywhere this hot! 🥵
Fortunately, I was able to do a bunch of cool things! The main ones being me launching the new version of my blog, and launching Carousel Pilot, something I built at work but have open sourced so other people can benefit from it.
Oh, and I also collected a few cool links for your enjoyment:
Artemis II Photo Timeline, by Hank Green
A nicely put-together timeline with a lot (all?) of the photos from the Artemis II mission that orbited around the Moon. The sequence of the spacecraft approaching the Moon is breathtaking!
Old’aVista, by Eric Mackrodt
This is like a landing page + search engine for the old internet! It allows you to search for stuff on the Internet Archive without having to necessarily know the URL of every website you wanna visit.
I found some forum threads from 1998 of people discussing the imminent launch of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Fascinating stuff.
Parallel Cities, by Victor Naumik
This website allows you to find the latitude of your city (or whatever city you want) and shows all the cities in the same latitude all around the world (or in the mirrored latitute i.e. opposite hemisphere).
My home city is opposite to Cairo, which is neat. The one I’m currently living in is parallel to Vancouver, which is also neat.
Optical Toys, by Tim Holman
A collection of fun optical illusions, with quick explanations of how they work.
I found out later that this is just one out of many other “toy” collections. I recommend checking those out as well!
Will it ever be? Probably not. What will happen then? Nothing good for us probably.
Why Socialism?, by Albert Einstein
Never thought I’d be linking to Einstein here, but this is a great essay about what constitutes humankind and society, how they differ, and how they mold each other (though this relationship is far from balanced).
The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society.
Still a great read even if “socialism” is a trigger word for you, by the way.
Better fluid sizing with round(), by Ahmad Shadeed
I’ve been using clamp() for fluid text sizing for a while, and this article highlights the pros of using the round() CSS function to make the fluidity more predictable! I love the card height examples too, as that’s something that’s consistently a pain in almost every project I work on.
UX Case Study: Waze, by Built for Mars
If you drive, you’ve probably hopped around between Waze, Google Maps and even Apple Maps at some point. Each has their own pros and cons, and while Waze used to have the edge on real-time information, that edge was stolen by Google Maps (not literally stolen; they’re literally developed by the same team).
But besides that, this case study goes into the differences between the 3 apps and how each displays similar things differently in order to highlight their own strengths.
Not that you asked, but my favorites are Apple Maps for actual navigation and Google Maps for everything else.
Thanks for sticking around, hope to see you next month!
2026-05-30 21:24:33
Yesss! I’ve waited for this for so long! One of the worst parts of my job is trying to implement those kind of separators (really common in designs) without this functionality being an actual thing yet. So many hacks, complex calculations, for something so visually trivial.
And even if it takes a while to get to other browsers, it’s mostly a visual drawback if not supported; so I can already start thinking about using it.
2026-05-30 09:01:10
by Tim Holman
A collection of fun optical illusions, with quick explanations of how they work.
I found out later that this is just one out of many other “toy” collections. I recommend checking those out as well!
2026-05-29 08:00:00
At my job at Useful Group, a need we often have is building carousels (or sliders, whatever name you prefer). While they are often overused (and badly used) around the web, they still have their very valid use cases. For those, we used to rely on third-party JS-based libraries like Slick, that while did their job well, still had some drawbacks that were annoying us:
Around 2 years ago, I tried solving all that and created a library called enhanced-css-slider. It worked and we’ve used it at Useful Group since then, but it had always been a little bit janky in some situations and it was a nightmare to maintain. So, I threw it out the window and built another solution from scratch that solves all the problems listed above + is smooth as heck! I called it Carousel Pilot.
We’ve been able to provide a really great horizontal scrolling experience with just HTML and CSS for a while now, especially with scroll snapping. What was left was all that carousels can do aside from scrolling. So, Carousel Pilot was created for just that.
[!info]
Check out the Carousel Pilot website for docs, examples and an interactive demo.
The idea is that you build your own carousel (with HTML/CSS, however you want to build it), and then add Carousel Pilot to it so that it can… pilot it. It’s a great way to add progressive enhancement to whatever you’re working on: make something that works well enough with just HTML and CSS, and if JavaScript is available, you can add actual functionality to it!
Right now Carousel Pilot provides you with:
The way looping works is that, if enabled, it will immediately clone all your slides a few times, to give looping some buffer to work with. It then keeps track of the real vs fake slides and, as soon as the scrolling motion stops, checks which slide is currently active. If it’s a real one, nothing happens. If it’s a fake one, it stealthily scrolls to the corresponding real slide — no animation, so to the user it feels like nothing happened at all. You can see this in action by making the scrollbar visible in the demo: notice how it immediately jumps to the right position when scrolling stops?
Of course, if I just clone the slides an X amount of times, it means that there technically is an end to the loop. And if you scroll long enough you see it, just like on the iPhone’s alarm settings. But I think that’s a fair compromise. I tried other approaches that would try to jump back to the real slides while the scrolling motion was still happening and they all ended up being too janky for my taste.
Hopefully this tool is useful to you, or at least this post was interesting enough, since you got all the way here ;)
As a reminder, you can find Carousel Pilot, its docs, and an interactive demo at carouselpilot.fantinel.dev.
Thanks for reading!
