“ONE FINE DAY, ON MY WAY TO FRANCE…”
1 February 2025
Colognole Farmers’ Cultural Association
Colognole di Pontassieve, Florence (IT)
Meeting and concert
Organized by La Leggera, as part of the Creative Europe Tramontana IV project.
The Tramontana Network has three French partners working on Occitan language and culture and one Italian partner working on minority languages in Mediterranean Europe. Through a series of chance events, the association ‘La Leggera’ has cultivated a friendship spanning more than twenty years with various people and organisations in some of the so-called Occitan valleys of Italy, more precisely the Alpine valleys of the province of Cuneo.
This long association has allowed for a fruitful and reciprocal exchange of experiences and knowledge, both in terms of linguistic and cultural differences and in terms of different environmental and social contexts: on one side the Alps, on the other the Apennines. While 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, are probably part of an Occitan-Provençal heritage that spread through Piedmont to the rest of Italy.
