CARSOLI (AQ) – In recent years, Italian villages have become a form of lexicon: restanza, terre dell’osso, resilient communities, paesologia, southworking, temporary inhabitants. Written by a passionate and courageous woman, the anthropologist Anna Rizzois truly a sentimental manifesto but it is also a song of anger: the story of how the marketing of abandonment for tourism purposes has transcended decades of literature, poetry, anthropology, social research, to create a seductive product but built entirely on guilt. The same years that the author spent sitting on the couch of the old women of the village watching mass on TV, shoveling manure with the shepherds, getting treatment from vets because not even doctors come here. Those villages abandoned for decades – remote, dilapidated, empty – hastily transformed into start-up villages, the stuff of which Sunday TV is made, followed by webinars, calls for reactivation. And finally us. Some villages will die, others will try to be reborn through forms of luxury fetishism that sell for hundreds of euros what was once poverty: hotels spread out on bony spurs of rock, no wifi, the experience of milking cattle. But those who face the return to the internal area in a non-tourist way must be willing to negotiate what we would never negotiate: health care, an ambulance that arrives in less than an hour, roads that are passable even in January, the right to public transportation, to a cultural life, to a high school for their children that is not miles away.
Invisible Countries (ilSaggiatore 2023) shows us what we had not understood: what the villages really are. Evocative and difficult lands, where there are indeed young people who decide to return, and where the price they pay, when they do, is very high. The return to the “bone villages”, balanced on stony peaks, where the orography counts as much as the dialect, is a challenge dictated by Love. And we cannot turn back.
As politician and activist Stefania Pezzopane recalls: “In small and sometimes forgotten towns, there are still about 13 million people who continue, despite everything, to live in Italian villages and towns that, every year, are becoming emptier, losing essential services and activities. How much work, how much effort to stop this shocking trend, but also how much slowness, how many mistakes. Too little has been done, so much unjust neglect and sometimes harm has been done, mistaking these places for consumer factories. In Carsoli we will talk about all this with anthropologist Anna Rizzo, waiting for the magnificent review of authors masterfully created by Eleonora de Nardis for Scanno”.
The event, organized by Biblio Mondo – The world in a room will be held on July 7th at 5.30 pm in Carsoli (Aq) in Via degli Alpini 211, in the presence of the mayor Velia Nazzarro and with the extraordinary participation of Stefania Pezzopane.
