I started photographing village festivals in Basilicata, southern Italy, in 2004, with my first visit to the massive tree festival in Accettura. One type of rituals I have photographed through the years are harvest rituals that involve bundles of sheafs of wheat carried as votive offerings. These take place usually during the month of August…

August the 16th is in many villages of Southern Italy the day to celebrate San Rocco, the medieval Saint Roch of Montpellier who preached and attended to the ill during a fourteenth century plague. The large village of Senise (PZ), in the Italian region of Basilicata, like many neighbouring settlements mixes this celebration with dances involving…

Today is the first day of this year’s cycle of funerals in Karankasso Sambla. Music has played all night yesterday, and today in the early afternoon there is more music and various rituals are performed. I have joined the hunters who gathered to honour the mother of one of them, Karim Ouattara. Karim is the…

One of the main aims of my April 2015 trip to Burkina Faso is to screen my documentary Kalanda – The Knowledge of the Bush to the hunters who are its protagonists. But the trip is also an opportunity to meet again, after three years, my fellow students in donsoya. As far as the group…

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my PhD dissertation, slightly edited and enriched of various media. I prepared this post for the reading list of my course in Regional Studies of Culture – West Africa on Ways of Knowing in the Mande. Learning to hunt One of the crucial days of my fieldwork,…

Radicazioni is a three-days music festival that sees on stage various groups inspired to folk music in Italy and abroad. Musicians perform on stage and later until early morning in the narrow streets of Alessandria del Carretto, a small village in northern Calabria, Italy. But it is also an important gathering for local musicians and young…