L'Alpe 04 - Mountain women

In an anonymous English pamphlet from the 1820s, a traveller hiding under the pseudonym of William Rose wrote: 'Courmayeur is set in a small deep valley (...) I have seen women busy carrying flax and carrying immense loads on their heads, undone by great heat and fatigue'. In an anonymous English pamphlet from the 1820s, a traveller hiding under the pseudonym of William Rose wrote: 'Courmayeur is set in a small deep valley (...) I have seen women busy carrying flax and carrying immense loads on their heads, undone by great heat and fatigue'. This is just one more testimony, one more, in support of what is stated in one of the 12 monographs proposed in the latest issue of the magazine L'Alpe, now in its fourth biannual issue and the result of an international agreement between Priuli & Verlucca editions and the French company Glénat. The subject of the various essays: the role of women in traditional Alpine society; and the first aspect that jumped out at first observers and then current scholars was the importance of the female element in the production of the family's means of subsistence. The seasonal emigration of men had in fact delegated much of the agricultural work to women, almost the entirety of it if we observe those communities where the seasonality of men's work also included the summer period (the example cited is that of the Walser of Alagna Valsesia, but, as we saw at the beginning, at the foot of Mont Blanc the situation seems to have been similar). In fact, the poet Lucio Duc from Valle d'Aosta wrote, painting the picture 'grandmother and granddaughter': " ... Une petite main potelée sur son noir tablier s'arrête confiante: plus s'avance une autre main, aux veines saillantes, lasse d'avoir trop travaillé, qui étreint avec amour et caresse lentement, ravie! Ce sont deux âges de la vie: l'enfant encore hésite sur les âpres chemins, alors que l'aïeule n'a plus de force: tari est son sein, et sa taille courbée par les travaux des champs. (...) " (Lucio Duc, La grand-mère et l'enfant, in La montagne inspirée, Aosta 1961) Some 140 years had passed since that Englishman's travel impressions, but the 20th century poet's soul draws an identical reality with the same melancholic stroke. If many pages of the magazine reveal to us what was a cruel world (the drama of the nannies, the maidens used as beasts of burden ...) others are not so dramatic: the kaleidoscope of the feminine universe also found its place in the mountains. A study by the French writer Anne Da Costa takes us through the evolution of Savoyard women's costume, which, there as everywhere, evolved over time, but which already changed over the course of a person's lifetime according to their status and age. It is also interesting to discover how there was a close correspondence between the custom of the feast and the liturgical calendar and, above all, it is consoling to know that, according to the author, a good part of this heritage of tradition and faith has not been totally dispersed, but lives again with sincere participation in certain solemnities linked to the Marian cult. Finally, a topical note from an article by the South Tyrolean anthropologist Martina Steiner, who informs us of the difficulty of finding a wife for the farmers of her land and, at the same time, of the laborious integration into family and community life of those who come from distant countries, whether diametrically such as the Philippines, or from the Germanic or Slavic area. The more than 70 pages dedicated to women do not exhaust the magazine's offer, which continues with another 45 dedicated to topical cultural information, always naturally from the Alpine environment. Reviews of