ABOUT MY SURNAME

Scansi (or Scanzi, as it was later written in Tuscan Italian) was a Venetian military family from Brescia. By the late 17th century the father of Bartolomeo Scansi moved to Sumartin, Brač, presumably to start a new life with a paga da guaso. Although Bartolomeo's name was written both in Venetian and Latin (as was customary for nobility), the exact date of birth was not recorded, and curiously enough, there is no record of the names of his parents. Bartolomeo's second child, Pelegrini Scansi (b. 1735)  is the ancestor of all currently living Skansi. The Skansi family in Brač was a naval merchant family, and my great-great-grandfather Luca was the last member of the family to be a native speaker of Veneto and during his lifetime he changed the spelling of his first name and last name to use a "k". He died during WWII from a heart stroke. This I know from the personal testimony of Darko Skansi, my grandfather and university professor of chemical engineering, who personally knew his grandfather Luca when he was a young boy and, not knowing Italian well then, he could not remember the particular sentences Luca uttered, but claimed that the language he remembers his grandfather Luca spoke was "not Italian", but that it was "some version of Italian". Luca Scansi owned an unknown number of ships, but it was certain he had at least one ship, and had acquired a second ship, a bracera named Mirvami. His son, Petar Skansi, during his life owned and co-owned several ships, among which his pride was his loger named Darko, commissioned in honor of his first son, my grandfather, which he captained. All of his ships were confiscated after WWII, as part of Yugoslav crimes against the Italian/Venet people in Croatia. The loss of the loger Darko broke him.