I have been having for many years a quite particular passion/hobby: to search for words’ meaning in the dictionary.
If you have some free time and you want to enjoy yourselves, I suggest you do the same thing. You will learn that words that are employed and spiced freely in every speech are often used in an improper and falsified way!
During one of my searches, my eyes alighted on the word beauty, which definition contained a reference to Leon Battista Alberti. With difficulty and relying on a little reminiscence of a lacking scholastic “culture”, I linked Leon Battista Alberti to the Renaissance and to architecture and mathematics, but I wasn’t able to understand the connection between beauty and Leon Battista Alberti. I suggest you read his definition of beauty, it was “illuminating” for me, and gave me the way to start an incredible search.
I became fond of this personality and of his story.
So I thought to look for a name in his family tree, that is visible once every 10 years in various exhibitions or in Mantua, inside the museum of the foundation dedicated to him. Since the next occasion was various years far, at that moment the “material” was untraceable. No problem, no frustration, there must be a solution! 4 weeks, some e-mails to Cultural Heritage departments and offices, to the foundation and the museum etc etc…and the problem is solved, I see the tree in a digital version.
But bad news: no inspiration and no name that could help me or fit in the label. Then I decided to take a step back and come back to the beginning, or rather the definition of beauty. This definition is included in the treatise De re aedificatoria, a revolutionary architectural essay written in Latin. Now I’ve got it! I want to do something revolutionary, scornful, original and strongly modern, and all these features reflect the tone of this treatise.
I reach the solution when, thinking about a name (and here my marketing & sales skills come into play), I realize that the name must be strong and apocopated, as well as impossible to mangle and easy to remember in any language.
Dè Rè!
In Tuscan language and dialect it means “belonging to the King”, but its translation comes from Latin, where Dè Rè means “concerning, with regard to, about”.
Therefore, since my wine talks about me, for me Dè Rè means talking of.