Controesodo. It’s what I call a ‘Lego word’: one made up of two or more other words cleverly clicked together to encapsulate a particular concept that would otherwise require a full sentence to explain. Unlike their more formal cousins, compound words, Lego words tend not to appear in dictionaries. Indeed, ‘controesodo’ doesn’t. But it’s component parts do: ‘contro’ means ‘against’ or ‘counter’ and ‘esodo’ means ‘exodus’. And ‘counter-exodus’ is the word Italians use to express ‘the time at the end of August when everyone returns to work or school from their summer holidays’. See what I mean?
So during the counter-exodus, while the roads are clogged with sun-tanned families heading back from the seaside, businesses and factories gradually hum and clatter back into life and ‘back to school’ ranges fill the shops, coastal resorts breathe a sigh of relief and start folding up the sun loungers, tourist attractions fall quiet and start offering off-season discounts. And up and down the country, countless towns and villages pack up their collections of trestle tables, benches, banners, pergolas and PA systems, congratulating themselves on having successfully completed another season jam-packed with sagre and feste, concerts and shows, pageants, exhibitions and markets.
The sheer number of these local events that take place throughout Italy during the summer months is truly remarkable – and not just in tourist hot-spots such as Siena or Venice, the Lakes or the Amalfi Coast. Even in tourism-lite Le Marche, our village – with its population of barely 3000 souls – has held a series of 3- or 4-day long events between June and August, all of which are regular fixtures in the summer calendar. We have had the annual artichoke festival, the annual pizza festival, a medieval weekend and a celebration of apiculture, and over the weekends in between, there have have been no fewer than fourteen live music, dancing or sports events. Our village is far from unique in this respect, mind: the August issue of Corriere Proposte, the catalogue of events that the region produces every month, contained a hundred and forty-six closely printed pages listing more than seven hundred events in eight different categories. A Sagra della Polenta up in Penna San Giovanna, anyone? Or a Horror Festival over in Monte Urano? How about the Palio down in Servigliano? Or maybe the Beer Circus in Pedaso? Or…? Or…? Or, or, or…
More remarkable still is that the fact that a vast number of these events will have been organised, promoted and run entirely by the local ‘Pro Loco’, sometimes with a degree of financial or logistical support from the Comune (town council). Roughly translated, Pro Loco means ‘in favour of the place’ and so the purpose of each of these entirely voluntary, not-for-profit associations (of which there are now some 6200 nationwide, the first having been founded in 1881), is the promotion of the town, its sites, its history, its traditions, its culture and – of course – its gastronomy. Interestingly, the principal purpose of all this activity is not, in the first instance, to attract tourists, but to improve the quality of life of the local residents by celebrating community identity and strengthening community ties. Our local Pro Loco certainly fulfils this purpose if the huge number of residents who enthusiastically participate in the events they lay on is anything to go by.
The Pro Loco movement, it seems to me, is an embodiment of the peculiarly Italian notion of ‘campanilismo’, which is rooted in the need in times past for communities to pull together to defend the parish bell tower – the campanile. This highly developed sense of allegiance is in turn derived from the fact that until little over a hundred and fifty years ago Italy was made up of a patchwork of perpetually warring kingdoms and dukedoms, imperial territories and papal lands, where conflict between neighbouring regions, towns and even neighbourhoods was commonplace. So loyalty to the local was often a matter of survival. Consequently, even today, if you ask a random Italian where they are from, they will probably give you the name of their particular town or village rather than a city close by that you are more likely to have heard of, never mind the name of the region it is in.
My increasingly dog-eared breeze block of an Italian dictionary translates campanilismo as ‘parochialism’. To me, though, this smacks of insularity, narrow-mindedness and mistrust of the different. And in view of its roots, it is easy to imagine that this is what it might have become in the modern era, with the activities of the Pro Loco conceivably a manifestation of little more than some kind of tubthumping tribalism and collective one-upmanship. In my as yet limited experience, however, today’s campanilismo seems much more benign, and much more akin to the modern concept of ‘localism’: support for the production and consumption of local goods, the promotion of local culture and identity, and lots of local accountability. It is therefore a celebration of local difference, which in this unified, more peaceful age is seen as enriching rather than threatening. Which is just as well, really for while the controesodo and with it the summer may officially be over, the work of the Pro Loco is not yet finished after all. As the days begin to shorten and the heat to fade, there are the celebrations for the grape harvest, the truffle season, the hunting season, the olive harvest, Advent and who knows what else for them still to organise…
Ms Marche 