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Rating: There is a world that, although still living today, seems buried in the dusty monochrome of time. A world that occasionally resurfaces in the thoughts of the present, often trivialized like a temporary fashion, sometimes remembered absent-mindedly beyond the wall of a damn dam and immediately closed in a drawer. A world that truly encompassed lives as harsh as the peaks that dominated them and that too often transcends the memory of present generations.
Yes, the peaks… they were the uncontested queens of this realm of suffering goodness; the mountains as proud life companions and at the same time tormentors with their inaccessibility, friends and foes of extraordinary people in their simplicity. Treasuries of resources and abysses of cruelty. It was the mountains that created the myth of the Alpine Army Corps, a heroic pride of Italy that once was, generated by the rocky and bare slopes of the Brenta as well as by the green forests of Piedmont or the sunny peaks of Sicily. These men, stubborn as hornbeams and as good as bread, sacrificed everything they owned and departed, mules at their side and black feathers on their trusty cloth companion. Mountain people, grim and hardened, dutiful; they obeyed without a word unless to offer rough courteous words. Or to sing…
The folk song has always been part of the cultural heritage of a community; but if in modern times it often becomes a vehicle for thoughts not always worthy of being spread, in the past it took the role of a true historical testimony. It was the memory for the illiterate, it was company for those who could not look after anyone but themselves; the song was the proud friend of the fireplace on fresh spring evenings where the labors of work disappeared to the bottom of glasses of raboso. Or, simply, the song was fun. For people devastated in their own being by wars and hardships and who tried, if only for a moment, to escape, to return with memories to their lives made of nothing and yet rich in everything, here the sheep of a Toni Bortolamoni or the love pains of a Dosolina were a glimpse of normality, a fleeting hold on happiness. The experiences of these phenomenal men and fighters, after all, reflect in the clear innocence of their wonderful voices: we can imagine to some extent their states of mind (in songs like the poignant “Era una notte che pioveva” or the disarming “Ta-pum”), but their hearts will remain ancient chests of stories that may never return.
I therefore want to talk about songs that are the cornerstone of our folk tradition, of words and melodies carved into the larch soul of mountain villages; I would like to speak only of these songs. If I do not refer to any particular collection it is because I often find them melancholic trivializations in their hideous covers with word-art covering the breathtaking beauty of our mountains, perhaps piled on shaky fair stalls, on the shelves of an improbable Italian folk collection. The immortality of certain singing heritages is not and should not be a fashion phenomenon unto itself, but the foundation of our very history to be passed on as a treasure to our children: “Cantiam la Montanara per chi non la sa”, as the Black Feathers would say.
If I refer to the Choir of the Società degli Alpinisti Tridentini it is for its eighty-year seriousness and what it represents: these mountaineers marked in their faces, their graying hair and their jackets, brown as the soil of their often-told mountains with sincerity (whether evoking the sensual beauty of Paganella or the cruel charm of Monte Nero), recall the feats of legendary Divisions as well as the moments of everyday life; they succeed in moving us with their clear voices that climb like ivy, one branch after another, on the walls of memory.
If I am writing these words, it is because I feel nostalgia – or at least awareness - of a world I have never lived. Maybe I write because I adore what these men were and are and because I shiver at the poignant purity of their singing. Or maybe I write because I want to contribute as much as I can to preserve their glorious history that rests in a cemetery of roses and their beautiful present made of peaks projected into cobalt skies of sun or white of snow.
I certainly write thinking adorably of my sweet grandmother, because when she hears the songs of the Alpini her eyes sparkle.
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