“BELLINA CHE SEI NATA ALLA MONTAGNA”
Research publication
In the context of Tramontana Network, three years after its first issue, there has been published a reprint of the volume “Bellina che sei nata alla montagna. Donne, agro-pastoralismo e migrazioni a Pietracamela” (Women, agro-pastoralism and migrations in Pietracamela), by Marta Iannetti, the result of long and intensive research with the beloved women of the Gran Sasso.
“And even now that she has left us I continue to hear her solid voice and her precise directions resonate in me”. This is what Marta Iannetti wrote of Luigina Panza, her main informant. And this is what one feels, reading the volume in which Marta’s voice is interwoven with that of the women of Pietracamela. In this polyphony, her voice rises clear, frank, brilliant even when she tells of loneliness, nostalgia, the silences of depopulated towns, of distances, of some regrets.
[…] Marta has given us a document that is also a testament, in its etymological sense of pact, promise, covenant. A pact that commits us not to stop at the fear of the other, at the sense of discomfort in the face of what we do not know and do not understand, but to be able to discern in the stories and memories of each of us the “almost clandestine possibility of alternative worlds, from which in a quiet glow appear the works, the spaces, the shared responsibilities, the marked times, the laborious complexity of the passages to survive, the creativity of making do renewed with each generation, the attention to matter, the mystical nature of matter, the geometry of organisations and the strength that lies behind a life in close, visceral contact with wood, rock, meadow, animals” (from the Preface by Valentina Porcellana).