Home | Valente and DiRenzo Family History - From Our Correspondent in Geneva
Roman Scale, Bilancia romana
Until the middle or end of the 1980s they used a balance of the kind the ancient Romans used to use to weigh everything at the market in Gambatesa, vegetables, coffee, wheat, chickens. The type of balance they used is held up with one hand; it has a dish on one end and an arm with a sliding weight on the other; goods are put in the dish and then the weight is moved until it counterbalances. But the balance in the photograph below is over a meter from hook to dish. It belonged to a man in Geneva.
