la festa di piadena

This weekend we went to the annual cultural festival in Piadena, a small town in southern Lombardy. At a big house in the countryside, choral groups, bands, and merrymaking leftists gather for three days of wine-drenched folk music.

This year we stayed mostly outside nel bosco and watched the groups rehearsing for their performances. My favorite group was the Suonatori Terra Terra, the same Tuscan group I saw play in la piazza della Signoria in Florence all those years ago that made me fall in love with folk music. I took some video of their prove, or rehearsal. This is one song that unfortunately is split into two parts because I ran out of space on my little point-and-shoot.

The structure of the song is a fixed chorus, written by Giuseppe Miriello and made famous by the great folk artist Giovanna Marini, followed by "improvised" verses, or stornelli. When the song was first written in the 1960s, it was directed against the Christian Democrat minister, Emilio Colombo. I Suonatori Terra Terra have updated the song by writing verses for today's Italian ministers.

The chorus of the song is:
Statevi attenti, voi della popolazione/Imparatevi a leggere e scrivere/Per difendervi dal padrone.

Which means: Pay attention, you the people, learn how to read and write to defend yourself from the boss (in the leftist sense). What the people need to defend themselves from changes depending on the verse they sing.

One of my favorite verses is the second in the first video. First the woman singing announces, "Arrivano le femminucce, here come the ladies!" Then she sings,
Ehi Ministra Gelmini, fa tagli sulla scuola
Li mette quarant'alunni con una maestra sola.
Hey Minister Gelmini, who makes cuts on education
She puts forty students in one class with just one teacher.

Another verse, and the most cutting, comes at the end of the second video and the song. The woman announces, "Who will there be for the finale?" and begins to sing,
Ehi primo ministro, si fa le leggi su misura
Difende i suoi privelegi, pare una dittatura (pare!).
Hey Prime Minister, who makes laws to measure
He defends his privileges, it seems like a dictatorship (it seems!).

The verses are teasing and comic, but when the singers arrive at the chorus, the joke evaporates into the urgency and seriousness of their call.

The day was full of choral groups and protest songs, but those of the Suonatori were my favorite. Maybe it's because they are mostly women singing and playing typically masculine instruments like the bass drum and the trombone. Maybe it's because they smile and raise an eyebrow, twisting the sadness or anger of their songs into something playful and subversive. Or maybe it's the music rising together with their human, wonderful voices. What I know is that it is a vital form of protest, both ancient and relevant, a rebel yawp accompanied by accordian.

Ma statevi attenti, voi della popolazione, imaparatevi a leggere e scrivere per difendervi dal padrone.

o roma roma città tanto cara...

I'm back in Milan after a Christmas vacation spent running around the southeast of the U.S. and then around central Italy...

F and I decided to go to Rome for the befana, Italy's way of celebrating the Epiphany, during which an old shriveled witch brings presents for the boys and girls. I wanted to get in a couple of adventures before returning to work, and I really wanted to catch some warm weather and sunshine.

We wandered the city for four days and three nights, and I have to say, Rome made us milanesi both envious. Okay, so the public transport is totally incasinato and maybe, yes, it's full of tourists, and of course, other Italians do say that SPQR stands for "Sono pazzi questi romani! These Romans are crazy!" But nonostante tutto questo, Rome is truly a beautiful city. Some examples of why we were jealous:

First, there were trees lining the streets, orange trees. With oranges.
Then there was a library with many comfortable nooks to read and study and a courtyard filled with...more orange trees! Plus an exhibit on street culture and graffiti.
The libreriacafè: Rome seems to enjoy stopping for a coffee and a book, unlike Milan, where when I asked my friend if there was a book bar like La Citè in Florence he said "Hmm, yes, I think there was, but it closed because no one wanted to sit around."
The clouds. In Milan, a cloudy day is a drizzly, miserable commitment, you're in for the gray, long haul. In Rome, clouds were a morning affair, a pause in an afternoon of sunshine, and evening shower. And the shades of gray even varied.
Trastevere, a wonderful neighborhood on the other side of the Tiber with winding streets and a beautiful central piazza.
The food. We ate out at two different osterie where we slurped up delicious cacio e pepe and munched fried carciofi and gnocchi with wine and amari.
Street musicians! A Dixieland jazz band in the middle of Villa Borghese! A trio of middle-aged Italians playing la tarantella in Piazza Spagna with tamburri and accordion just for the hell of it!

Speaking of musicians and food, our last night we ate out at a restaurant in Trastevere called l'Antico Moro. The food, as I mentioned, was delicious and inexpensive, the waiters were friendly in their hurry and made delightful expressions of exasperation and playfulness. The menu said "gnocchi freschi fatti in casa ogni giovedì" so it being giovedì I ordered gnocchi. The waitress's eyes widened theatrically and she asked me to wait a moment. She trotted to the kitchen where we could hear her yell into the door, "Ehi! It's Thursday, eh! Did you make them?" She returned, exhaling, "Yes, we have the gnocchi."

Later a huge group of people ranging from teenaged to retired marched in and sat at four tables in our part of the restaurant. I thought they might be a big Roman family eating out for the befana, but we eventually found out that they were veneti and that they had arrived at the trattoria in a big tour bus. Turns out, their tour agency had also hired a typical Roman folk singer (in realtà from Abruzzo) to serenade them alla romana, and we got to benefit.

This guy entered teasing and playing with the veneti, choosing various members of the group to pick on. He quickly allied himself with a long-faced vecchietto Marco, who enthusiastically sung along to every other line (and later saluted me with an "Adios!"). He would start loud and determined and then trail off as he forgot the words and then riprendere il filo when he remembered again. The folk singer sang "Quanto sei bella Roma" and "Roma, nun fa' la stupida stasera" and even some stornelli. For each chorus of the the vulgar, playful stornelli he serenaded specific people, choosing F and I as the two innamorati and then telling F to explain the dialect and double entendres to me later. We concluded with a big singalong of "Arrivederci Roma":

a moment

Photo by Guelfo Ajello

Last night we cut through Parco Sempione on our bikes. It wasn't yet 8 but it seemed later, daylights' savings always takes some adjusting for me, the sun was long gone and the nebbia had begun to creep between the trees. The gates of the park are open until 9 but no one ever seems to go in after it gets dark, only a couple of people walking their dogs. We rode down the white muddy path under the dim lights and between the trees and heard music, a saxophone. A lone man was playing jazz beneath the loggia of the old arena, without a hat on the ground and no one to hear him but us. Sad jazz that echoed and ribombava under the Napoleonic arches. I felt I could have been anywhere. He didn't acknowledge us and we passed him by, I never know when to stop, but his music followed us all the way out the gate into the street.

Lazy at best

I've been a bit down on the posting, and this time I can't even blame it on the good weather: it's been raining for about ten days straight.
And I can't blame it on nothing happening in at school. For example: A week ago, I was introducing Joyce to my 5th year class. We had just begun to read "Eveline" when a boy whipped around in his seat and vomited all over the floor. There were screams, half the class escaped to the window, the other half outside of the classroom. Lesson put on hold. The next day I was on the third floor and saw some of my 5th years in giro. They said, "Hi Rachel! We really like Joyce!" Sure.

And it's not that I've been bumming around the house: I went to Florence with F a week ago, which was lovely. We caught La Notte Bianca , where shops stay open into the early hours and there are concerts and hordes of night owls. Then on Saturday we took the train to Sesto Fiorentino to attend Primo Maggio at Istituto di Ernesto de Martino, the place where I interviewed Ivan della Mea and in general fell in love with folk music.
Here is a video of one of the choruses at the festival singing "Stornelli d'Esilio," one of my favorite leftist songs. Chorus is like this:

Nostra patria è il mondo intero
e nostra legge è la libertà
ed un pensiero
ribelle in cor ci sta

Our homeland is the whole world
Our law is liberty
And a rebel thought is in our hearts.

More or less.

There's more, but I am a bum. So I will wait until I am not a bum/not sfasata from a 9-7 workday.