Raccolto A Sud

The struggle of dialects to be acknowledged with the same dignity as languages with a literature of their own has been a long one, and yet it seems forgotten by many. With this in mind and after a long quest for the sources of his own music, Donato Fumarola, an Apulian pianist and composer, started collecting and putting into music the materials of his research concerning the most significant Apulian vernacular poets using their Bari dialect. Chiara Liuzzi is the performer turning the words into sounds, echoes, songs, thanks to the alchemy of a universal metalanguage, hidden here and there in the old Apulian dialect with it's sounds and colors, evoking ancestral worlds. The travel mate along this journey is Nicola Puntillo with his bass clarinet to pave the road and suggest new paths. Melodies, melopoeias, waltz fragments, plainsong, profane prayers, mix with improvisation elements in a kaleidoscope of memories, of long-forgotten stories of the past that seem asleep during the day and are brought back to life by the night winds, thus bringing back to mind images of the rural world, it's landscapes, the cultural and economic gap between Italy's North and South, and the longing for the happy poverty of that vanished world. Poetry is turned into song, the "vulgar" becomes the sparkling sound of the original language of the motherland. The journey sets off moving from "some of the fathers" of Bari's twentieth-century poetry, such as Giuseppe de Benedictis, Antonio Nitti, Nicola Gonnella, with a tribute to Vittorio Bodini, to younger artists like Giovanni Laera from Noci and Maria Nardelli from Locorotondo, up to the recognizable and well-known voices of Pietro Gatti from Ceglie Messapica, Lino Angiuli from Valenzano, Vittorino Curci from Noci and Grazia Stella Elia from Trinitapoli. The journey ends with a folk prayer.