Part One: Chapter V--LARES, LASA, AND LASSI

This is a 19th-century antiquarian and folklore essay — most likely by Charles Godfrey Leland — arguing for the survival of the ancient Roman and Etruscan Lares (domestic ancestor spirits) in living Tuscan peasant belief under the name "Lassi" or "Lasii." The author builds the case by triangulating classical scholarship (chiefly Müller's *Die Etrusker* and Preller's *Römische Mythologie*), field interviews with Tuscan informants, and primary texts he collected: a semi-dramatic folk tale in which a dead father's ghost reclaims a squandered estate and reveals hidden treasure, and a midnight witchcraft invocation using playing cards to petition the Lasii for a favor. The central claim is that these spirits are identifiably the same as the ancient *Lares familiares* — ghosts of ancestors acting as protective household geniuses — with the linguistic link from "Lasa/Lares" to "Lassi" treated as near-conclusive given parallel survivals of Tinia, Fufluns, and other Etruscan deities in folk tradition. A distinctive and recurring argument is methodological: the author attacks German academic classical scholars for their failure to use folk-lore evidence, dismissing their erudition as blind to "a nuance of colour" or real knowledge of lived tradition. The piece is notable for its bilingual primary texts (Italian originals with English verse translations), its portrait of the Lasii as benevolent, family-bound spirits rather than fearsome ghosts, and the personal testimony of a narrator who believes she encountered a *lasia* in childhood.

Part One: Chapter V--LARES, LASA, AND LASSI

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