A BEL DÌ ANDANDO IN FRANCIA…
Meeting and concert
February 1st, 2025 at 08.00 p.m.
Circolo Culturale Contadino di Colognole
Colognole di Pontassieve (Florence, IT)
In the Tramontana Network, there are three French partners dealing with Occitan language and culture, and one Italian partner dealing with minority languages in Mediterranean Europe. Through a series of fortuitous events, the “La Leggera” association has cultivated a friendship of over twenty years with various people and realities in some of Italy’s so-called Occitan valleys, more specifically the Alpine valleys of the province of Cuneo.
This long association has led to a fruitful, reciprocal exchange of experience and knowledge, both in terms of linguistic and cultural differences and the different environmental and social contexts: on one side Alpine, on the other Apennine.
If in Tuscany, France is evoked in the oldest traditional ballads as a foreign destination par excellence, in the communities of the western Alps it has always been a daily presence/influence. Most of the old ballads still known today and sung intimately along the Apennine ridge, especially by women, probably represent an Occitan-Provençal heritage which, through Piedmont, descended and spread to the rest of Italy.