SHAME AND PRIDE
Pizzica: a story of belonging
and becoming in South Italy
MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology Anthropology Department, GSSS University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam
July 3rd
2017
Supervisor: Dr.Yolanda vn Ede 2nd Reader: Dr. Vincent de Rooij 3rd Reader: Dr. Rob van Ginkel Word count: 22.897
Student: Elena Cristina Finariu Student number: 11186070 Email: efinariu@gmail.com
Formulae on Plagiarism
I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.
Elena Cristina Finariu July 3rd
2017
Acknowledgments
When I was ten years old I was watching Italian television all the time. My father surrendered to my passion and one day gave me a Romanian – Italian dictionary, encouraging me to learn the language. He never knew how speaking Italian changed my life. This thesis is for him.
I want to express my gratitude towards the amazing people who helped me throgh the entire process. To Giovanni Amati and his family grazie mille for the kindness, the hospitality, the homemade pasta, for the friendship and all the unconditional help. Grazie Roberta Grasso for finding me and for directing me towards the best person I could’ve worked with. To Mauro Durante and all the members of the Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino thank you for your time and for sharing your stories with me. To my supervisor, Yolanda van Ede, thank you for believing in me, for your guidance, patience and kindness. Salma Mostafa, Bea Malagutti, Francesco Ferreri and Simone Artigas Chaurais thank you for your help, for constantly encouraging me and for being the best coleagues and friends. To all my other colleagues with whom I spent countless hours on the fifth floor, your presence made this process bearable and enjoyable. Dankjewel Pepijn le Heux, nothing would have been possible without you!
Not only I wrote a thesis but also I learned countless lessons from every single one of you. What you mean for me goes beyond the boarders of these pages. Thank you from the botom of my heart!
Abstract
This research is about the folk revival phenomenon in Salento, South Italy. It investigates the reasons and meanings behind pizzica pizzica music and dance revitalization as a part of Salento cultural tradition. The history of the pizzica pizzica dates back to the 13th century and used to belong to tarantismo, a popular belief of the unprivileged and a ritual of suffering and pain – almost “exorcism” through music therapy. I traveled there to understand why the revival of traditional music and dance occurred and what folklore means for the present community in a globalized world. Until recently this music was rejected, qualified as backwarded and shameful, associated with sufferance and poverty. I explored how pizzica pizzica and other forms of south Italian folk music found their place and gained relevance in contemporary representations of local traditions. A piece that until recently belonged to a peasant culture and was a source of embracement and prejudice evolved to a popular music performed with pride in the backyards of locals and on stages of world music festivals. Pizzica pizzica became a source of confidence and cultural distinctiveness.
Table of Contents
FORMULAE ON PLAGIARISM ... 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ... 2 ABSTRACT ... 3 INTRODUCTION ... 5 THE BEGINNING ... 12
DOVE ABITA ANGELO CORDELLA? ... 13
CHAPTER I: TRADITION AND FOLKLORE ... 16
HOW THE SALENTINI ARE TALKING ABOUT TRADITION, ABOUT FOLKLORE. ... 21
IL FALO DI SAN GIUSEPPE. ... 27
FRA NU PICCA! ... 30 LE GABALLO ... 32 MEANINGS OF TRADITION IN SALENTO ... 34 HISTORICAL OUTLINE OF SALENTO AND PIZZICA PIZZICA. ... 36 CHAPTER II: GLOBALIZATION AND IDENTITY ... 40 “I HAVE TO MAKE TRADITION FUNCTIONAL FOR THE PEOPLE AGAIN!” ... 40 REPRESENTATIONS OF IDENTITY TO THE OTHER ... 44 IL CONCERTO ... 45 THE BALL IN ROME ... 47 PIZZICA PIZZICA HOME AND ABROAD ... 48
SAN MARZANO DI SAN GIUSEPPE ... 48
CHAPTER III: BELONGING AND BECOMING ... 52 GIUSEPPE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY ... 53 ARRIVEDERCI ... 56 CONCLUSION ... 59 BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 63
Introduction
I am a migrant from Romania, currently living in The Netherlands. I don’t know if I will ever go back ‘home’. Also, I am from a migrant family. My family doesn't originate from where I grew up. In the last ten years, I changed 16 houses, five cities and three countries. I am also an adopted child, which amplifies the need to find ‘home’. Because of constatly feeling out of place, I looked for familiarity in traditions. Growing up, I became more and more interested in folklore, in traditional music from all over the world. I found myself in something that is not mine but to which I can relate. I always had the need to make sense of the social context in which I am living. I look for familiarity and for social practices to which I have to relate in order to feel that I belong to one particular space. Living and studying in The Netherlands increased my confusion regarding who I am and where my place in society is. I realized that being able to represent my distinctiveness in front of others culturally is extremely important. What I perceive as folklore and what I qualify as tradition derives directly from my personal experiences, my interactions with the world and the different cultures I’ve been exposed to. According to Allred (2008) folklore is informally learned. It is a personal knowledge about the world, cultures and traditions. Therefore ‘their’ folklore will be different than mine, the traditions as well.
The purpose of my inquiry is to observe what individuals perceive as tradition, what influences their perceptions and how dos it this translates into the practice of folk music in the context of contemporary society fast-forwarded by globalisation.
I came across south Italian traditional music about five years ago when an Italian friend suggested me to listen to the music from his region. He sent me a YouTube link of La Pizzica di San Vito performed on the stage of La Notte Della Taranta1
festival, the biggest event dedicated to South Italian traditional music. I was attracted to this music immediately. The irony was that only later, during fieldwork I came to understand that people did not define this festival as a fair representation of what traditional music is. In spite of that, it is because of this event that I discovered the existence of pizzica pizzica. Five years after my friend sent me that link, something triggered in me the desire to know more about Salento and its
1 The Night of the tarantula. This festival takes place every year since 1998 in the last Sunday of August in
traditional music. Despite what some people from the local musical environment might say about it, without the exposure that this festival created, it is less likely that I would have ever came across pizzica pizzica at all. Pizzica pizzica belongs to the family of the tarantella, although in Salento, this term is never used. Pizzica pizzica has its roots in the phenomenon of tarantismo, a form of music therapy (Ludtke: 2012). It is not very clear why people use the word double. The most likely hypothesis is that it takes its name from the instruments a pizzico2. The double word is an intensifier, which is very common in south Italian dialects;
people repeat one word to reinforce the concept. Therefore pizzica pizzica can come from the technique used to play the instrument. Some believe that the word comes from the pizzico della tarantula3
. When we discussed about the origin of the word, Giovanni, leader of the Li Senature di Ostuni band4, I will elaborate more on this group in the following pages,
mentioned that for him the first hypothesis is the most plausible.
Records of the practice of tarantismo go as far back as the thirteenth century. In the summer during the harvest, it sometimes happened that a poisonous tarantula bit women. The tarantata -term used to describe the person affected by the condition, caused by the spider bite or other reasons, such as a particularly traumatic episode- would fall ill and sometimes behave as being possessed. The only cure for this condition was the music. The “treatment” consisted of playing for the sufferer the music of the tamburello5
harmonica and fiddle until the person was cured of the spider’s poison, or at least until she no longer feels the need to dance -symptom of the disease- (Daboo, 2010:6). During the healing ritual the taratata will react to the sound of the music, she will start dancing and identify herself with the spider that bit her. The purpose of the dance was to make the spider that possessed her dance as well until its exhaustion. She would dance in her own rhythm, running around the room in an imaginary chase of the spider, making trample moves, as the spider would be under her feet (De Martino, 1961:83). This ritual could last hours or entire days, until the tarantata will eventually collapse, meaning that the poison is no longer affecting her.
2 Instruments with strings, like mandolin. Pizzicare /a pizzico means in this context the action of pinching the cords. 3 The tarantula’s bite; considered to be the cause for the illness treatable only with the pizzica pizzica music. 4 The musicians from Ostuni (city in the North of Salento, although the northern limits of the cultural area are still not very clear) 5 Tamburello or tamburo is a percussion instrument made of a circular wooden shape on which a goatskin is attached. On the wooden circle side there are attached metal plates. Pizzica pizzica cannot be performed without it. It is the main instrument of Salento folk music tradition.
It is generally stated that the tarantismo phenomenon as previously explained is entirely extinct. The ritual began to decline in the 19th century and by the 20th century there were only a few instances of its performances (Daboo, 2010:6). Judging by the latest cultural actions, some of it survived, but in a transformed manner: la pizzica pizzica. The interest in pizzica pizzica music and dance and its revival started in the beginning in the 1970’s and gained momentum in the 1980's and 1990’s (Daboo, 2010:5).
During my fieldwork I explored the various meanings that people attach to the performance of pizzica pizzica. In order to deepen my understanding of it I collaborated with two folk music bands from Salento. Li Senature di Ostuni band has a conservative approach regarding how folk music should be performed, from the vocal and instrumental point of view. Giovanni, their leader, prefers to use techniques he learned from elder musicians for playing and singing. He is generaly strict regarding the representation of tradition through folk music. For example he advocates for the acoustic interpretations, for the performances in ritual contexts, or in small settings that allows the band to closely interact with the audience. Giovanni is a musician and musical instruments artisan. In the past fifteen years, he researched different representations of tradition across the entire Apulia region. He donated part of the recorded material to the Archivio sonoro di Puglia6
. He is 32 years old, and he lived his entire life in the countryside. He repeatedly told me he would never leave, because he would be nothing without it, this is his social environment. He talked with many elders and had the possibility to hear how the musical environment used to be in the past; I also had the chance to hear some of these stories about how women used to sing in the fields during the harvest and how men used to sing in the osterie7
in the evening.
The other band, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino8
, is more progressive in its approach, they are advocating for development of folk music and for its adaptation to contemporary public 6 Apulia sound archive. It is an institution that gathers recordings of traditional Apulia music. Giovanni’s material (250 recordings gathered between 2003 and 2008) is available for free on the institution website: http://www.archiviosonoro.org/puglia/archivio/archivio-sonoro-della-puglia/fondo-amati-bagorda.html 7 A place where until the mid 1900 simple food and wine used to be served; evening meeting point for the man. It was a place meant for social interaction. 8 Canzoniere is a term that defines a collection of texts or lyrics, in the context of the group this term is defined by the activity of gathering old texts and songs, as this was the initial purpose of the band in the 1970’s. Grecanico stands for the “Grecia Salentina”(Salentine Greece) an area within Salento, where a dialect similar to Greek language is spoken, called griko, and Salentino stands for Salento, the group’s area of origin.
requests. The Canzoniere, formed by writer Rina Durante in 1975 is regarded as leading and longest-standing folk music group in South Italy. They describe their music as a representation of Italian fascinating dichotomy of tradition and modernity; and see it as the leading exponents in a new wave of young performers re-inventing musical and dance traditions of South Italy for today’s global audience9
. Mauro Durante (32 years old) is the current leader of the Canzoniere and son of Daniele Durante; the band’s former leader and one of the founding members of the group. Mauro studied classic violin and composition. He is currently living in Lecce, the biggest city of Salento. During our conversation he often talked about the adaptation of Salento’s folk music to the contemporary needs and he told me:
“We truly and sincerely believe that traditional/folk/world music should answer some immediate, urgent need. That's why we write our lyrics and compositions, speaking about the
present days and performing with our musical sensibilities. This music is important now, it's not just a postcard from the past, and we have to keep it fresh and alive." (Mauro Durante)
Mauro statement is interesting in the sense that it provides an example of what tradition means in the present for a young educated urban member of the society. It also underlines the need to adapt tradition to a society characterized by the rapid changes globalization brought. Contemporary tradition is no longer represented by a group of people that live outside the modern society (Hansen 2016). Members of the community nowadays are actively contributing to tradition conservation and creation through the performance of practices like pizzica pizzica. In Salento music was always an integrated part of peasant’s everyday life. It was a way to communicate and to deal with the daily difficulties that they had to face. Songs were orally transmitted and as they were performed people would add or change lyrics and enrich text with their interpretation, creating a common body of knowledge that encapsulates moments of their lives, believes and struggles. The social environment changed with the advent of industrialization, especially in the rural areas. The contexts and forms in which traditional music was performed transformed as well.
“The music is still somewhere there but it makes no sense to sing anymore, because nowadays there are no more trainieri (horse cart drivers), there are trucks, the olive trees are
no longer cut by groups of people but by machines, one person, so they don't sing anymore” Giovanni argued.
Giovanni’s quote is an example of how industrialization directly influenced the cultural changes, especially tin he countryside. People used to work the fields together and used to sing in order to make the time pass, to make the heaviness of the labor more bearable. Sometimes singing was also a way to impose and maintain the rhythm during work. With the industrialization, machines replaced the human labor; an activity which in the past required a group, now it can be done by a single person with an electrical tool. In the present times the agriculture related activities are no longer a context favorable for music performances. Society changed and so did the settings. Therefore in order to ensure its survival, people changed traditional music and adapted it topresent realities. Traditional muisc must tell the story of the contemporary society; therefore people changed its texts, forms, beats and the places where it is performed. The stages replaced the fields. Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino in the context of a left political movement in late 1970 brought this music on the stage, in the squares and theatres. They used folk music as a tool to condemn the sufferance of the working class and the peasants. The new emerging groups wanted to tell the story of these social classes. This story was deliberately forgotten because it had been bringing much sufferance. They used music with an empowering social purpose, to send a message, as it has been done in the past as well (Santoro, 2009:39).
Salento was characterized in the past by poverty and hard work and music was a way for the people to express themselves, to tell stories about everyday life. Alessia Tondo (25 years old), female voice of the Canzoniere band and a musician representing the folk revival movement - riproposta- told me that traditional music is powerful and people can easily to relate to it. It touches themes that people belonging to the same social class can relate to: love, labour, migration. During the industrialization times many songs got lost because they were no longer performed. The texts were orally transmited and rarely written down. Now many are trying to reverse this loss by going back to the old songs, to their traditions. Many of the musicians I spoke to told me about the need to preserve their identity, the need to tell the story of their land. In a post-industrial society, there is a dilemma though; how to hold on to one's tradition without seeming backwarded, while at the same time trying to make sense of the past and fitting it into the future. I see these dilemmas are a consequence of “local appropriations of global processes such as glocalisation“ (Eriksen 2015:377).
Confusion characterizes many of the modern developing societies, recognized as glocalization -independent cultural phenomenon interpreted at the local level and adapted to the local needs (ibid.380). This dilemma is reflected in the two directions I identified in the folk revival movement in Italy. One direction is called riproposta10
, which stands for a modern approach of the pizzica pizzica. Small local groups that are trying to recover and preserve older forms of local folk music represent the other direction. Musicians talk about riproposta as an attempt to make pizzica pizzica become part of the world music styles. Some people I spoke with disagreed with the adaptation of Salentine folk music to the world demand, because the changes which were done to its performance are damaging its authenticity and the music loses its meaning. For example, one local once told me that having a ballerina dancing by herself on the stage is an invention that makes no sense. Pizzica pizzica when performed for the purpose of entertainment should always be danced in couple. The disagreement is even stronger when it comes to the idea of stage representations of tarantismo, the cure through music therapy. When the ballerina plays the role of the person that is “dancing the poison away”. The healing process was a ritual performed privately, the struggles of the sufferer were real and the families used to keep this event far from the community’s eyes. Folklore is transformed into a representation of tradition in order to fulfill the need to state cultural distinctiveness through a compromise. Giddens cited by Eriksen (2015:382) states that “tradition does not go away, but it had to be chosen self-consciously and defended against its alternatives.” In this sense reviving and integrating pizzica pizzica in a wider space (from rural to urban and global) can be regarded as the choice Salentini11
made to better represent their culture. There are modern pizzica pizzica bands that have concerts all over the world, telling their story, promoting Salento’s cultural heritage by translating it into a globally understood language (Erikesn, 2015:287). There are also people who are fighting to preserve the folklore in an unaltered way, as a counter-reaction to the modernization of it. Giovanni Amati, leader of Li Senature di Ostuni talks about a tradition meant for the locals, kept alive in the rural areas, and slowly transformed, through an increased awareness of its past forms. He is well aware of the social changes of the contemporary society on the one side; nevertheless, he chooses not adapt to the global trends. 10 Translated into: propose again. It is the movement that describes the new ways of performing the pizzica pizzica, with new texts, in a more experimental way, with addition and changes made to the original forms of the songs. 11 Salento inhabitants
The first chapter explores different theories that address the importance of folklore and tradition in the contemporary society and how the process of Globalisation influences it. Hansen (2016) argues that cultural traditions are being revived to establish a model for continued identity. Another definition describes folklore as knowledge, values, and social relationships within a community, necessary for the production of traditional culture and emphasizes that in order to exist, traditional culture needs the people to practice it and to perpetuate it (Bartolotto, 2007). In term of the relevance of folklore for the local cultural identity and its production Appadurai (1996: 178) underlines the responsibility that community, especially few members of it, holds to create and protect their social space. People do so via a process of cultural reproduction, an example of this is the serenade ritual that I will describe later on. The practice of folk music was not uninterrupted in Salento, and it is only in the past years that people started to appreciate pizzica pizzica. The perception of tradition varies from one person to another. Many musicians with whom I spoke experience their local traditional culture differently based on the environment where they came from: rural or urban. I noticed that ritual practices, like serenades are mostly performed in the countryside.
The second chapter is a summary of the folk revival movement, what pizzica pizzica and other forms of folk music meant for the people before it gained the relevance it has today. Shame was the most common word people used for describing the attitude towards folk music in a Salento under development, at the border between modernity and ‘backwardness’. Eriksen (2015:361) talks about ethnic revitalization as a phenomenon during which cultural symbols and practices, which have lain dormant for a while, regain their lost relevance. This is what happened in Salento during the folk revival movement. It started from the interest of a few to reconnect with the past. People talked about their fear of losing their cultural heritage and this is how something, which was previously regarded as shame, was revitalized and brought to stages and proudly presented as a common cultural Salentine treasure.
The third chapter is about people, about how the folk music returned to its community in a private setting. Despite the contradictions and different perceptions on how it should be performed and preserved, folk music transformed in a way that ensured its survival. Folk music has the ability of creating a sense of familiarity that people associate to home. As a ‘nomad’ I am drawn towards cultural elements in which I can recognize myself. In a way,
this type of music and the traditions that surrounds it are an answer to my emotional need of belonging.
The beginning
“Hello my name is Elena, I am a student at the University of Amsterdam. Between January and April I will be in Salento doing a research on pizzica pizzica and Salentine folk revival. Could someone please help me with some information or direct me towards someone else?”
It was late November. I posted this is the message on a Facebook group dedicated to people passionate about pizzica pizzica. I had no reply until one day, when I received a private message from a girl, Roberta.
“You can ask me, and I will know where to send you, to the person that is most suited to talk about the folk revival movement. I am young, but I play tamburello. I started to do it when I saw who was performing on stage; it is in fashion lately you know. But then I began to look for more authentic people; I give you two names after I met them tradition started to make
more sense for me” Roberta said.
The names she gave me were those of Giovanni Amati and Vincenzo Santoro. This is how it all started. Vincenzo I met much later, but with Giovanni I got in contact immediately. Once I arrived in Salento he became the key informant and my friend that opened all the doors for me. Because of my interaction with Giovanni, the gathering of my material started before I came in the field. Soon after Roberta introduced me to him, we called four and a half hours on Skype, during which he guided me through the work he did in the past fifteen years to preserve different forms of traditional music. We talked about the riproposta movement and about his perception of how tradition should be practiced. At this point, I needed to find a band with a more progressive approach to have their opinion as well about the folk revival movement. I emailed several groups without success. My last resort was Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, a band I was already familiar with, as I was listening to their music long before I got the idea to do this research. They were formed in 1975 and they were among the most prominent actors of this phenomenon. In my eyes, they were the rock stars of the pizzica pizzica environment and I never thought I could approach them. I wrote an email to an
address, which I took from their official website, without any hope for their answer. Within half an hour I received a reply from the leader of the band telling me that I was most welcome and that we should meet as soon as I were to arrive in Lecce. The doors were open for me at that point.
I arrived in Lecce on 5th of January 2017. Roberta previously gave me the address of a location where there was an event dedicated to folk music. Giovanni was right at the entrance of the building smoking a cigarette. On the stage, there were Mauro Durante and Vincenzo Santoro, and Roberta was inside as well. This is how my fieldwork started. On the first day of my arrival in Salento, I had all the key players that Roberta told me about right in front of me. A Salentine friend was accompanying me that evening. It was the same person who five years before made me listen to that Pizzica di San Vito. “Only to you it can happen that in the middle of the winter, on the first day of your arrival an event like this is happening. This is not so usual. You are lucky,” he told me. I was happy my ethnographic fieldwork was off to a good start.
Through the entire time spent in Salento, I conducted some twenty interviews, countless informal conversations and I observed and recorded 15 events. If I were to use one word to describe the entire research period that would be: overwhelming. Every single person I encountered wanted to talk to me and everyone had their own story to tell, all the doors were open for me, the only thing I had to do was ask.
The story about how I met Angelo Cordella is the best way to exemplify what access to information means in Salento.
Dove abita Angelo Cordella
12?
I am with Giovanni in a small city not far from Lecce. We are going to interview an old accordion player, but Giovanni does not remember where the man lives. We go in the main square of the city. In front of the church, there is a group of a senior man talking. He approaches them. “Excuse me, do you know where Angelo Cordella, the accordion player, lives?” The elders speak for a while with each other; everyone has a different version of where the man could live. In the end they agree: That house on the corner with green details
on the door. Surprised by how easy people share this kind of information with strangers I ask Giovanni if we will just go and knock on the person’s door. He confirms, as it is the most normal thing in the world. We go to the indicated address and we ring the door. We are welcomed inside and offered a place at the table in the living room. The moment we sit the lady of the house fills the table with home made liquor, and we start to talk. Angelo Cordella takes out his accordion and begins to playwhile, with their permission, I film the scene.
This is how people reacted to my presence and with Giovanni’s help and connections things became even easier. He took the responsibility to help me as much as possible during my time in Salento. I was living in at his parents’ house for five days a week and I followed him and his band, Li Senature di Ostuni, everywhere. The group performs different traditional songs more conservatively. I participated in every event he took part in, I went everywhere the band performed, including Rome. Given the setting of our meetings, I decided not to formally interview the band members. Instead, I interacted with them informally; creating an environment that put them more at ease. I spent time with them during concerts, parties and dinners. This way I was able to always interact with them in a relaxed, natural environment. I felt they behaved natural and never regarded me as the researcher that came to ‘study’ them.
The situation was very different with the Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino members. Each of them lives in a different city. During my time in Salento I never managed to meet them all together. I contacted them individually and conducted separate interviews with each of the members. Every person was available and willing to talk to me, I spent approximately one hour with each of the members. Unfortunately, I was not able to observe how they interact with each other and what is their relationship in normal context, as I was able to do with the members of the other band. I did go to see them in concert in Germany after my return to Amsterdam. They did not have any concert in the area during the winter season, but in the little time we had together they answer and explained to me what I needed to know. During my presence in Germany, they invited me to dinner and to have drinks after the concert.
I felt overwhelmed all the time by the amount of information and experiences. Everyone wanted to talk to me, everyone opened the door, and people welcomed me like like I was famil. Not only I conducted research, but also I lived incredible experiences. The people I interacted with welcomed me and made me feel like home. I recognised in their behavior and habits many of the peculiarities that also exist in Romanian culture and this increased the
feeling of familiarity that inevitably influenced the way I looked at and analysed the entire experience. I found myself at home; I found friends and a new family. Two months after my departure from Salento I went bayck to visit. People’s reaction to my unannounced visit confirmed my feelings of belonging. Roberta was waiting for me in front of the central station in Lecce and greeted me with tears and a strong hug. I am the friend that comes back to visit, not the researcher from Amsterdam.
Tradition and folklore
“The word folklore (spelled ‘folk-lore’) was proposed by British antiquarian William John Thoms. In 1846, he suggested that this “good Saxon compound” be used to describe “the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs,” and other materials “of the older time” (Klein, 2015). Folklore is what links individuals to a community through the recognisable patterns, continuity and reproduction of human knowledge (Buccitelli & Schmitt, 2016:13). Another definition describes folklore as knowledge, values and social relationships within a community, necessary for the production of traditional culture and emphasises the fact that traditional culture to exist it needs the people to practice it and perpetuating it (Bartolotto, 2007).
According to UNESCO intangible culture heritage Recommendations on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore:
“Folklore (or traditional and popular culture) is the totality of tradition-based creations of a cultural community, expressed by a group or individuals and recognized as reflecting the
expectations of a community in so far as they reflect its cultural and social identity; its standards and values are transmitted orally, by imitation or by other means. Its forms are,
among others, language, literature, music, dance, games, mythology, rituals, customs, handicrafts, architecture and other arts. “ (UNESCO intangible culture heritage website) 13
Tradition is what makes a person identify with the cultural and geographical place; a set of characteristics that gives community its distinctiveness. “Tradition connotes a social connection and historical precedent that underlie a cultural presence. It frequently means continuity of a practice through time with which people are familiar, a way of doing things” (Bronner, 1998:12). In this sense for Romanian emigrants to go back home every year to spend the Easter with the family, to get married in the Church and have your child baptized few months after its birth is tradition. Folklore is represented by the Padre Nostrum my mother tells me nine times if I feel sick, because she believes that the person with blue eyes that looked at me in a certain way is responsible for my temporary physical illness.
13 See UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage website:
MacEdward Leach gives another definition of tradition as quoted by Bronner (1998:13) that is “the accumulated knowledge of a homogeneous people". Here lays an interesting detail, regarding the homogeneity of culture. In the case of pizzica pizzica and tarantismo, the knowledge belongs to the poor, especially present in the rural areas, as the tarantula that triggered the condition while working in the fields would sting the woman. The practice of tarantismo given its link to the past is qualified as something from ‘the old time’ is regarded as folklore, belonging to the lower classes. In this case the principle of homogeneity cannot be applied. People from the urban environment or from higher social classes were not identifying pizzica pizzica and tarantismo as part of their traditions. However, pizzica pizzica remained after tarantismo disappeared and during the revitalization years it was promoted as something that belongs to everybody. It became something part of Salento cultural history, a marker of identity, something that was always there. “It was the belief that through folk music and dance the spirit of the territory could be revived,” Vincenzo said.
Hansen (2016) argues that cultural traditions are being revived in order to establish a model for continued identity, but when I discussed about tradition in Salento, most of the people talked about discontinuity first and then continuity. They associate tradition with folk music. Folklore is pizzica pizzica as a ritual, as part of tarantismo -a healing ritual. During the times of the economic boom in 1960-1980 there was a moment when this music almost disappeared. Folklore was deliberately forgotten because it was labeled as a marker of underdevelopment. It belonged to the peasants, which was a social class highly stigmatised; therefore everything that had to do with it had to disappear. The old Salento was a place full of superstitions and practices like tarantismo were considered a sign of backwardness. Sometimes after coming back from the fields, people would celebrate with folk music and dances at the masseria14
. The owner, usually a noble, would never participate, as it was not suited for a parson with that social status.
With the industrialisation that occurred in the 1960’s people started to abandon the work in the fields and the masserie. They moved to the city to work in the new emerging industries. They were the sons and daughters of the peasants that used to work in the fields. Their parents 14 A set of rural buildings used as farms, typical of Southern Italy and in particular of the Puglia region, named after "masserizie" (furnishings, furniture, pastoral and pastoral tools, food stores for people and animals), Which were kept and protected inside large stone buildings where peasants, pastors and owners lived. Some, owned by noble and rich families, were also fortified and fitted with wall murals and defensive towers
embarrassed them as they were looking forward to a modern world. Folklore was not part of this new world; it was something that must be forgotten as soon as possible. They wanted to erase anything that had to do with poverty and with the lifestyle of the previous generation. Giancarlo Paglialunga (40 years old), tamburello player of the Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino band recalls: “all these songs were deliberately forgotten, because for the generation before us now, to hear the grandfather or the father performing that music (folk) was something that caused shame, deep shame”. He told me that the desire to forget was so big, that after the death of the father or grandfather they would take the tamburello and throw it away, or burn it. At the beginning of the 1970’s people like the members of the Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino tried to fill in the gap created by the previous generation by rediscovering and bringing back texts and songs. Nevertheless, not all the elements that belonged to folklore were revived. The music and dance part of pizzica pizzica that survived/has been revived, a transmission of a cultural, musical phenomenon, became a Salentine tradition but without the folk-lore (peasant knowledge) of healing. Pizzica pizzica lost the negative connotation due to the association with the rural environment, which was stigmatised by the previous generations.
Alessia is part of what can be called the third generation; the sons and daughters of the ones who rejected the folk tradition in the years of the industrialisation. Her generation never lived the poverty, never experienced in a direct way the shame of coming from a family of contadini15
, therefore they idealise in a certain way the life their grandfather lived. This is how some people in Salento explained the contemporary shift in the perception of folk music and the increased pizzica pizzica popularity. About the rediscovery of the Salentine folk music Alessia told me:
“Salento became famous with the creation of the La note Della Taranta. Until a few years ago people did not talk about Salento, they talked about Apulia, which is the wide geographical region. Salento did not have this national fame. Therefore, it was important to give identity to
a community. Now when they talk about Apulia, they will say I come from Salento. It is a sort of redemption because in Italy people still experience this big difference between the North and the South. Therefore to claim back an identity, a recognisable sound, be part of
15 Paesants.
something will make someone immune to the feeling of inferiority, If one feels a strong connection with its roots, its traditions.”(Alessia Tondo)
She talks about tradition as a mix between past, present and future, as an identity that is being now constructed, but by some preexistent selected elements. Pizzicaca pizzica was indeed revived, but in this process it did not inherit everything. Its negative connotation and links to popular believes like tarantismo were no longer defining it. It this sense it is hard to tell if this phenomenon can be regarded as a continuity of identity that Hansen described (2016), as elements that are regarded with pride today such as peasant culture, represented until recently a source of shame. It is a transformation and a continuation at the same time (Hansen: 2016). Pizzica pizzica became a part of Salento traditional culture. Music was not the only element that was changed to better serve the community’s contemporary needs. “New traditions can be readily grafted on old ones, by borrowing from well –supplied warehouse of official ritual” (Hobsbawm, 1983:6). The society continues its flow while people find shelter under tradition’s safe roof (Bronner, 1998:154).
The nights during the carnival time every year in February show a good example of how individuals use their tradition. They are allowed to challenge the social norms openly during the carnival. In this period people are safe under the protection of the masks, which they are wearing. Men dress as women, priests, policeman and women dress as nuns, men, old ladies and many other characters. Their costumes represent human typologies or institutions and they walk down the streets adopting behavior opposite of the one their character would have in society. For example, Giovanni complained that a ”nun” grabbed his butt on the street, “I have no idea who she was, she was wearing a mask”, he said. Perhaps the most explicit element of institutional mockery was a senior man, driving a small tractor with a cage attached to it. There was a pig inside the cage. There was a big white fabric on top of the cage with the inscription “govern”.
Fig.1. Carnival on the streets of Montalbano.
Despite decades of study it remains difficult to define folklore. In the latest approaches scholars instead of looking at it as expressive forms that are necessary for continuity they decided to treat it as perspectives and processes that might be illuminated through such keywords as “folk,” “tradition,” “genre,” “performance,” “text,” and “art”(Klein, 2015). When talking about folklore Klein underlines some particularities that define it, such as oral narration, rituals, crafts, music making and other forms of vernacular expressive culture. To study and understand folklore, tradition is an essential element that needs to be taken into consideration, defined as “a process of transmission and to name specific repeatable and retrievable cultural elements” (Klein 2015). Brumann (2015) argues that heritage conservation is universally acknowledged as a moral obligation. Related to the possible conscious desire of cultural preservation, Baron (2016) talks about the role community holds in the process of “culture safeguarding”, which he labels as public folklore: a movement which enables communities to present their culture on their terms. It is the public aspect of the folklore that Baron talks about that got my attention in Salento.
Because of the differences in perceptions the public folklore is not homogenous. This is perceived as a threat in terms of the role that the community has to safeguard it. The question is what is to be safeguarded and in which form. What has been left is the folk-loric part of
healing, what remained was the music and the dance that transcended old social differentiations between rural and urban to connect the past to the present. The folk revival movement and the practice of pizzica pizzica as tradition have currently two directions: the progressive and the conservative, in the literal sense of trying to conserve what has been defined as traditional. This dynamic comes to underline how difficult it is to explain what must be taken into consideration in the contemporary times as tradition, how to practice it, what to preserve and why.
How the Salentini are talking about tradition, about folklore
In the years following World War II, folklore like taratismo was a source of shame, a taboo subject even within the Salento community, a sign of backwardness and primitivism (Daboo, 2010:3). Therefore pizzica pizzica and other forms of traditional music were not always as popular among people as they are now. The riproposta movement and the increased interest for folk music is something, which occurred only at the beginning of the 1990s. The refusal of this music is still fresh in the memory of the ones that currently practice it. Despite the fact that most of the people I spoke with associate tradition with contemporary elements, they were also talking with nostalgia about old lost practices, such as tarantismo, which they defined as part of the peasant cultural heritage. This can explain the current pizzica pizzica music and dance revitalization through the need to connect with a romanticized past. It is a process of developing a sense of belonging through the act of bringing into the present the memories of the past. Hobsbawm (1983) suggests that symbols from the past can be used as means to create cohesion within a community and to strengthen the sense of regional or ethnic identity as tarantismo is recognised as essential part of Salentine culture independently from the connotations that had along the years (Daboo, 2010:200).
Salento Peninsula is the most southern part of Apulia region in South Italy, the land between two seas Ionian and Adriatic. Salento spreads over an area of 2500 square km, it has 200 km of coastline and it ends at its bottom with the city called Santa Maria Di Leuca, also known as Finibus Terrae (Daboo, 2010:12). Due to its geographical position, Salento is a place of passage, between East and West, which made it vulnerable to invaders and colonisers. In time
all these people left their marks on the landscape, culture and identity of the people. Greeks, Turks, Albanians all contributed to the cultural diversity of this territory. Remains of these exchanges are present in dialects like griko, from a pre-Roman time, when various Greek city-states colonised the area (Daboo, 2010:16). The biggest city of the area is Lecce. A beautiful bourgeoisie city called the South Baroque capital due to its beautiful architecture.
The territory is particularly multicultural, but the South compared to the rest of the country, is considered less developed, with people attached to their land and superstition. I have heard several times that these people were discriminated quite often while they were travelling to the Northern parts of the country. A common term used to address people from the south is meridionale or terrone, which has a negative connotation (Daboo, 2010:20). Terrone comes from the word Terra, which means earth. Terrone is translated as the person that works the land- hence a peasant. The territory is scarce in resources of water and the land is not very fertile. Therefore the inhabitants experienced severe hunger in the years after the World War II. Music played a particular role in this community as people used songs to communicate, to tell the story of the hard life: malavita. Massimiliano Morabito, the organetto16
player in the Canzoniere group, talked as well about how the peasant culture was denigrated during the industrial boom, how traditional music was abandoned because of its link to this social environment:
“Those contexts in which traditional music was performed were connected to a precarious condition from the economical point of view. Therefore what happened was that, on one side
it was the television that started to tell the people: throw away the old and replace it with the new, on the other side, there were the people that used to say: let’s go and work in the
factories instead of staying in the countryside.”(Massimiliano Morabito)
In the 1970s, Italy experienced an economic boom due to intense industrialisation. People moved from working the land to working in the factories. Being from a peasant family that used to work the land had become loaded with shame, as well singing the music that
16 A melodeon or diatonic button accordion is a member of the free-reed aerophone family of musical
instruments. It is a type of button accordion on which the melody-side keyboard contains one or more rows of buttons.
reminded about its “shameful and backwarded” past. This way the elderly musicians started to sing more “modern” things and many songs of oral tradition got lost.
In the past two decades, the importance of the pizzica pizzica as part of Salento’s cultural heritage was underlined by the heavy promotions of it for touristic purposes. The cultural richness of Salento started to be used as a tourist attraction. This can be deducted by the emphasis touristic websites put on it. For example under the tab “traditions of Salento” one site states17
: “come to live an unforgettable Salentine night: A magic evening to enjoy both the local culinary specialties and the overwhelming pizzica”. The Salentini embraced pizzica pizzica as one of their particular cultural traits: “Here is one of the few places where if you meet someone on the street and you ask what is the traditional music of Salento they will tell you: la pizzica“ V. Santoro remarked.
It is hard to state clearly if the phenomenon in Salento is a revival or a continuity of a tradition. It is a subjective matter; different actors involved in the movement have different opinions. According to Vincenzo something that was already dead cannot be revived. It is hard to speak about continuity in the context in which many songs and text got lost, especially during the 1960’s, due to the traditional music rejection of an entire generation. Following the same discourse another gap, that has been pointed out to me, underlines the idea of discontinuity, that is the perception that pizzica pizzica dance transformed so much in the last two decades that it made it unrecognizable to the previous generation. Many songs and texts got lost due to the traditional music rejection of an entire generation. Following the same discourse another gap that has been pointed out to me underline the idea of discontinuity, that is the perception that pizzica pizzica dance transformed so much in the last two decades that it made it unrecognizable to the previous generation. Giovanni told me a story about how once he brought an elder musician to an event; he entered the room and saw people dancing. He approached Giovanni and asked: “what are they dancing?” it was a pizzica pizzica. In that moment Giovanni realized the dance was so different that the man did not even recognize it. However, there have been isolated situation where families never abandoned the traditional singing even if there were only performing in private for the family. Alessia recalls: “My
grandmother always sang, because her father was also cantore18
. In reality they never had the
17 See: http://www.salento.com/offerta-vacanza/mercatini-e-tradizioni 18 Traditional music singer.
shame in doing it because my great grandfather was also singing. Besides that they always lived in the countryside. But my grandmother remembered that very often people would not sing because there was the risk of being perceived as the fool of the village, therefore it was not a thing well seen.”
In opposition to riproposta there are few musicians, like Giovanni, who have chosen to perform the Salentine folksongs in a manner that respects the older techniques. They learn directly from elderly musicians or from other members of the family that are currently or that used to play a certain instrument. They perform in small settings, mostly without amplifiers, and their repertoire consists of traditional songs of oral transmission. These two dimensions although overlap. According to Vincenzo Santoro, the “traditional” 19
does not exist. He thinks that Giovanni’s activity is also part of the riproposta, because of the lack of continuity in the performance of Salento’s folk music.“Giovanni decided at some point to recover the tradition, he took the young boys and made them sing.” Through this statement Vincenzo is underlining the ‘new’ in Giovanni’s activity. He teaches children today to sing and play in the old way. This old way had to be rediscovered first by Giovanni, and then to be passed to the other young musicians. In this sense is a revival of the old techniques. These worlds are interconnected […] even if they will never admit it; theirs is a rebound of what happened in the Salento Leccese20
. Vincenzo’s hypothesis is that without the riproposta, the contemporary activity of documentation and preservation of the old forms would have never happened. Giovanni’s research activity comes as a counter reaction to the riproposta phenomenon, which represents the progressive ways of performing the Salentine folk music. Giovanni disagrees, and tries not to reinforce it. He wants the young musicians to learn how to play with those techniques from the elders but not from the new bands.
From the very beginning I felt that life in Salento flows under strict unwritten rules; not only regarding the performance of folk music, but also when it comes to everyday life routines likes eating. 19 During the conversations Giovanni used the term tradizionale (traditional) to describe the way he is performing the local folk music. He sees tradizionale as the opposite of riproposta, which is the style used by groups like Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino. 20 Usually when discussing about traditional music in Salento the territory is split musically speaking in two Alto (High) Salento, where Giovanni and his group come from and Basso (Low) Salento where most of the riproposta groups come from, including Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino. In the Low Salento the revival movement was much more prominent, where pizzica was brought on festivals stages.
A few days after I arrived in Lecce I went out for dinner and ordered some pasta with shrimps; I called the waiter to ask for some parmigiano to put on my pasta. “Is the cheese for you, for that pasta, are you going to put cheese on top of that pasta?” the waiter replied. I later understood that was quite offensive what I did as the waiter left intrigued from my table after realizing I was not joking and I actually put the cheese on. The whole restaurant started laughing at his reaction and at mine. I was obviously not from there and I clearly broke the rules. I reflected on all those small particularities that I was struggling with and I realized they are nothing else but a set of unwritten rules that regulate everyday life rhythms here, the tiny things that define this place. Is this tradition I ask myself? “What is tradition for you? “ I asked every single musician I interacted with. I asked the same thing to Alessia. We were in my kitchen drinking a moka café.
“When I say traditional, I think about a recognisable sound, a language that is still spoken, is difficult, because I think there is a difference between traditional music and popular music. For me, the tradition is my land, what I have come to be now; tradition is the dialect, communicating with my grandmother using the same language. Tradition for me is my grandmother and my family. The Christmas festivities, the sweets we make together, homemade pasta, my country; tradition is the context in which I live. Both from the geographical and social point of view, with all the difficulties this implies. I come from a small village in the province of Lecce, sometimes people have a closed mentality. In spite of everything this for me is tradition. I live tradition every day; my family does it as well. For me tradition is to acknowledge that in my area there are the peasants that sell fruits and vegetables, so I will go and buy it from them instead from the supermarket. I cook traditional dishes from Salento and I speak dialect, I love speaking dialect. For me tradition is alive, is everything I live now” (Alessia)
Alessia’s statement me made me understand that for her, and many other people I interacted with, tradition is a part of everyday life. Tradition is not something that belongs to the past; it connects the past and the present, through sets of experiences and practices that people use to describe the particularities of life in Salento. People described tradition differently and no one was able to give me a clear definition of what it is, however I did understood what it is not. Tradition for them is everything that is not brought by the “Americanization“ everything that goes beyond the contemporary standardisation, the music radios play, the textile industry, the
fast food (Conversi, 2010:24). “For me the real strength is the acknowledgement of what makes us (Salentini) different from the others” Alessia said. This perception of what tradition is, it is not an isolated one. When I asked another member of the Canzoniere to describe it, Mauro talked about:
“A mix of many things, practices, songs, cuisine, everything that in a way a community feels representative of its own history, a consequence of one’s identity. Therefore it is really difficult to set a boundary between what is traditional and what is not.”
For Giovanni tradition means something else, it is his entire behaviour, the choices he makes in terms of food, the way he spends his money, his choice to buy meat and milk directly from the farmer. For Giovanni tradition is the respect one must pay to his land. In Salento there is a trend now that the old masserie are being transformed into hotels and often the entire architecture is modified. Every time we would pass in front of such a structure Giovanni would tell me the history of that place, who the owner was, what activities used to be conducted in that specific farm. For him tradition is sustainable agriculture and industry, the care for the environment.
Altogether the sum of practices such as: folk music, speaking the local dialect, cooking local cuisine, supporting local farmers and business, taking part in the processions dedicated to the protective Saint of a specific city, contribute to the creation of a local traditional culture (Bartolotto, 2007). Through their perceptions of what they conceive as their culture and by constantly practicing it, Alessia, Mauro, Giovanni and all the people I spoke with seem to be active contributors to the creation of their contemporary local traditions.
Defining tradition becomes important in the context of contemporary times, which are characterized by rapid expansion and quick mobility of people. This combined with the refusal of cultural products and practices to “stay put” gives a profound sense of a loss of territorial roots and cultural distinctiveness (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992). In this context it is interesting to see which elements the Salentine musicians define as most important. Cornell and Gibson (2003: 14) argue “the associations between music and ethnicity are creating identities for individuals, social groups, and even whole regions”. They also argue that there is no society without musical tradition, but the dilemma I struggled with during my presence in Salento and even after my return is what comes first, music as an independent aggregator of the community or music as an additional element that completes the tradition? Depending on the context it seems that folk music fulfils both roles. For the small community of
Montalbano being together felt like it was the essence and since the context is created, music will follow. The “fire of San Giuseppe” was an example of a context in which it is hard to define what was the main factor that brought people together. The music, food, drinks, a fire and people celebrating the name day seemed to be equally important.
Il Falo di San Giuseppe
21One day before the event we went to gather wild asparagus in order to make frittata, a traditional dish, for the night. Giovanni spent the last few days inviting people to the event, cooking, shopping for the necessary food, and arranging the branches for the fire. For two days we did nothing else than prepare for this evening.
I am thinking about how happy I am to be part of all this, although I don’t understand why all this is happening I enjoy taking part in the process. I am anxious and curious for what is about to happen. Giovanni is running all over the place. He is happy and mad at the same time. He would like people to be more involved, to be more pro active in relation to this event, to feel closer to the meaning of it. We are dirty, sweaty and tired. “Maria, bring us 4 beers and something to eat!” one of the men yells. A voluptuous bartender comes over and fills our table with fried chicken and other small aperitifs. We continue making plans for the evening. I see everyone enjoying each others company, one had to work the whole day, the other one has to leave early because he has to bring the wife somewhere. They talk about everyday life issues, a busy adult life filled with responsibilities that makes it difficult for everyone to find the time to be together like we are now. They all know each other since many years, they grew up in the same neighbourhood but nowadays they barely meet. Tonight is a good opportunity.
Giovanni asked a neighbour for permission to light a fire in an empty space in front of his house. The stack of dry olive tree branches is ready. On the street in front of the house there is a big table filled with food and drinks; wine, frittata, mortadella, and many other Italian specialties. People of all ages are gathered around the table. The stack of olive branches is around two meters high. It is time to light up the fire. A few man gather around it. Giovanni holds a torch and he is trying to light it up from underneath. “Pastina, bring here your guitar so we can throw it in! The fire is not starting!” Giuseppe yells. “Do you need more wood?”
Pastina replies from somewhere in the back. “Yes, yes, bring it!” the men around the stack confirms while laughing. Meanwhile Giovanni manages to light it up and he steps away from
the fire applauding. “Auguri a San Giuseppe22
” he said. “Auguri!” we all reply. The boys from the band are all here. They go under an olive tree close to the fire and start to play. A serenade first, then a pizzica pizzica. They occasionally take a brake to eat, no need to do so for the drinking, as they constantly hold plastic glasses filled with red wine while thay play. I overhear a conversation between some elders “how come they sing like this without microphone?” one man asks surprised. “Of course they do it like this, the microphone ruins everything” another one replies. Somewhere close by, a big white van just parked. I see the boys in the band approaching it. They start to sing a serenade. I follow them to see what happens. My heart melts. In the car there is a disabled girl, I saw here before, they went for a serenade to her house as well. She smiles at everyone from the car. They play at least three long songs for her. The girl kept smiling during the entire performance.
It is late; the boys are singing a folk song from Gargano23
now. I see Giovanni smiling at them with a slightly disapproving look, he gives up eventually and joins them singing. It is almost midnight and almost everyone is gone. Only the youth is there. One of the band members approaches the group. “Since we are all here now I take advantage of the situation to give you all this!” It is an invitation to his wedding that will take place in a month. We all congratulate him and his future wife.
After participating and talking with the people that took part in the San Giuseppe ritual I understood that tradition is not kept for the sake of tradition. The fire of San Giuseppe, or any other ritual is not the purpose in intself, it is made for and by the people, it is an opportunity to come together. Without these rituals people argued that everyone would just carry on with their lives individually, caught up in the everyday life routine, work, family. Organizing the San Giuseppe fire can be seen as a responsibility that the community, more precisely, a few members of it, took for creating and protecting their socio-cultural space via a process of cultural reproduction (Appadaurai, 1996:178). The San Giuseppe fire is just one example of how the community takes action in creating and reproducing their local identity through the practice of different forms of tradition. Another example is the “Singing at the eggs”. It is a
22 Congratulations for Saint Joseph.
23 Area in the North of Apulia region. The tarantella from this region is very different from the ones in
Salento and it requires a particular type of guitar in order to be performed, the boys did not have it, Pastina played a normal guitar.
habit I never witnessed, but about which Giovanni talked as something extremely important for him. “I must be dead or something not to do it” he said to underline the importance this event has for him. The Holy Saturday night before Easter different groups of men gather, get their instruments and go from house to house in the village all night long to sing in people's houses. They will perform a particular type of music that is not to be performed in any other circumstances. The musicians will be rewarded with eggs and other goods by the hosts. This confirms how important the contribution of the community is in creating their cultural identity and to protect it from oblivion. Locality is a fragile social achievement, which must be maintained carefully and protected against various kinds of challenges (Appadurai, 1996: 180). On one hand it can be threatened by the “outside”, characterized by globalization, the movement of people, different types of capital, media, modernization and industrialization, all of which interfere with the way tradition and folklore are being reproduced. On the other hand, the threat can come from inside the community, where passivity and abandoning certain practices can lead to their extinction.
This was the case for example with certain texts or songs of oral tradition, as the cultural heritage of oral transmission is the most fragile and exposed to the risk of extinction. If just one generation abandons an oral tradition, it could be lost forever. Numerous people I talked to were aware of the frailty of it.
The importance of the rural-urban distinction in terms of community perceptions of traditions was underlined by a discussion I had about the practice of the serenade. I talked about it with a friend unaware of the existence of this ritual during the carnival weeks. He lives in a small town close to Lecce and for him performing in the middle of the night in front of someone’s house in not quite normal in an urban environment. He made me reflect on the fact that traditional practices are indeed more specific to the rural environments. When I told him this story and explained other situations I experienced he told me that I am idealizing it, this is not true, “I can’t believe is still happening” he told me. "If you go and play in front of someone’s house in Lecce not only they will think you’re crazy but they will also call the police and fine you” he concludes. I feel lucky I was able to experience for the first time the ritual of the serenade. The story:
