“The indies down here”, the Cicolano Archaeological Museum presents the book by Roberto Lorenzetti

The presentation of the book “Le indie di quiggiù” and “Gente senza storia”, two books by Roberto Lorenzetti, will be held on Saturday afternoon 20 April in the MAC conference room. “The indies down here” is a story of how some photographers between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries described the peasant world of Sabina and Upper Sabina in a historic period in which the process of de-ruralization had begun and in which the peasant world showed traces of its decline.

Following the echoes of the Grand Tour, the first photographers were real hikers and explorers of territories that remained outside the most well-known and usual itineraries of travellers. On the route of the Via Salaria, they arrived in Rieti and Terminillo and then sometimes continued along the more inaccessible and mountainous routes of the Cicolano. The story is conducted in a chronological, but also topographical sense, following in particular the preferences of the individual photographers who first encountered the rural world of the upper Sabina and then documented, almost in an ethnographic sense, the Rieti area and the lower Sabina.

The proposed book is more than a thematic collection of photographs, it is the story of a now disappeared world of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, which even in the mid-twentieth century in Sabina remained immobile, clearly indifferent to the processes of transformation that were affecting overwhelmingly all the rest of the territories. A world now dissolved that we can find in the many demo-ethno-anthropological museums spread across the area, which tell the story of the great hardships of work through the tools. A book recommended for all those who want to delve deeper into the history of their territory through a sort of story illustrated by images. “People without history” is a story in images published for the first time in 1985 at the conclusion of a long journey which had as its incipit a photographic album presented to accompany an intervention on a theme of ethnographic museography, which later became an exhibition.

Today it is presented in its second edition which constitutes a timely documentation of a world that no longer exists, but which was current just forty years ago. This book almost constitutes – says the author himself in the introduction – the last chapter of “The Indies Down Here” in which they tell the residual signs of life of a world that has definitively ceased to exist. Taken together, the two volumes tell the story of the peasant world of this area from the dawn of photography to the end of the 20th century. Mariano Calisse, Mayor of Borgorose, will bring institutional greetings to the event scheduled for 5pm at the Cicolano Archaeological Museum in Piazza S. Francesco 7, Corvaro di Borgorose (RI). He will dialogue with the author Federico Fioravanti.

Roberto Lorenzetti lives in Contigliano, in the province of Rieti. He has always been interested in historical and anthropological research. Today, after having worked and directed the State Archives of Rieti, he is retired and dedicates himself to the research that most excites him such as those concerning the Sabina in many of its aspects through tools such as cartography or historical photography. “The Indies of here” and “People without history” are now added to a substantial production that the author has produced and taken care of in detail. Dr. Francesca Lezzi Director of MAC Corvaro di Borgorose, 25 November 2023