TRADIZIONI POPOLARI

This section of the portal is dedicated to the production of songs and other expressive material by non-professionals informants: ordinary people whose voice and/or instruments have been recorded on the field since the 1960s. Many documents are drawn from the AELM (Ethnic Linguistic-Musical Archive) of the Central Institute for Sound and Audiovisual heritage, which is one of the most interesting and noteworthy collections reconstructing the cultural and linguistic heritage of the Italian Regions. Founded in 1962 by ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella and linguist Antonio Pagliaro, the AELM is one of the last and most significant systematic campaigns of collection and recording of folk traditions before the general linguistic and cultural homologation of Italy. Divided by region and organized following a dialectological-musical criteria , the AELM collection includes ethnic and folk music, narratives from the storytelling and oral traditions, folk shows and performances, liturgical and ritual music, and dialects of alloglot islands, where the spoken languages were brought over some centuries earlier by the ancestors who settled in those territories far from their homelands: Albanian, transplanted in southern Italy (in the aptly named Piana degli Albanesi) and in Sicily in the fifteenth century; Greek from the colonies of Magna Grecia; Serb-Croat in Molise; Catalan in Alghero, Sardinia; small Gallo-Romance clusters in southern Italy, Franco-Provençal in the province of Foggia (Apulia) and Provençal clusters in Guardia Piemontese in the province of Cosenza (Calabria), to name but a few examples.