L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 14 L'Italo-Americano LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE I n the deep south of Puglia, in the flat, s u n b u r n t h e e l o f Italy, there is a cluster of villages where the o l d p e o p l e s t i l l g r e e t y o u (and still sing) in a language that is not quite Italian and not quite Greek, but some- t h i n g o l d e r t h a n b o t h , a Greek dialect called Griko, that has somehow survived here for the better part of three thousand years. The n i n e t o w n s t h a t k e e p i t , places like Calimera, Mar- tano, and Sternatia, make up the Grecìa Salentina, a small Greek-speaking island marooned on Italian soil. Its music is at once one of the loveliest things in the whole Italian South and one of the least known. To understand and love that music, you have to hold three migrations in mind at the same time: an almost unimaginably old one, the G r e e k c o l o n i s t s w h o reached these shores in the eighth century before Christ, and the Byzantines who came a thousand years after t h e m , l e a v i n g b e h i n d a tongue that refused to die. B u t t h e r e i s a l s o a m o r e recent – and painful – one, one that works in reverse and has been emptying these villages since the early 20th century, when the work ran out and the young left for the N o r t h , f o r G e r m a n y , f o r America. Most people who fall for t h i s m u s i c f a l l f i r s t f o r K a l i n i f t a , w h o s e n a m e means simply "good night,"a serenade traditionally credit- e d t o a C a l i m e r a s c h o l a r n a m e d V i t o D o m e n i c o P a l u m b o , w h i c h h a s b e c o m e t h e u n o f f i c i a l anthem of the whole Grecìa. It is performed at the close of every festival in the long open vowels of Griko, often b y p e o p l e w h o n o l o n g e r speak the language yet know every word of the song. But the piece that truly breaks your heart is Klama. If Kalinifta is the region's lullaby, Klama is its open w o u n d : a r a i l w a y w o r k e r f r o m C a l i m e r a , F r a n c o Corlianò, wrote it in 1972 in the voice of a wife watch- ing her husband leave to find work abroad, calling it at first O klama i jineka u emi- grantu, the lament of the emigrant's wife. Nothing in it is folkloric, this is a real cry that travelled, crossing the sea to Greece, where singers l i k e M a r i a F a r a n d o u r i made it famous, and reach- i n g d o w n t h e d e c a d e s t o young Italian stars who still perform it to audiences, often left in tears by it. A song in a fading dialect, about leaving home, that refuses to be for- gotten: many of our ances- tors, of all people, knew how that felt. Beneath the Griko songs runs something older, and perhaps better known, the pizzica, today a wild and j o y f u l c o u r t s h i p d a n c e o f whirling skirts and hammer- ing tamburello, but rooted in the dark old ritual of taran- tismo, in which women said t o h a v e b e e n b i t t e n b y a tarantula (or taranta, in local d i a l e c t ) w o u l d d a n c e f o r hours, sometimes for days, to tambourine, violin, and a wheezing organetto until the venom – real or imagined – had been driven out of them. If the dancing failed, they would be carried to the little chapel of San Paolo in Galati- n a t o b e c u r e d . I t w a s Ernesto De Martino who gave all this its dignity, trav- elling south in 1959 and con- cluding, in his great La Terra del Rimorso, that the spider was mostly a pretext, a way of giving a name, and a cure through music, to a far deep- er human pain. B y t h e 1 9 7 0 s , t h e o l d tarantate were dying out, and the young were faintly a s h a m e d o f t h e p e a s a n t music, until a few people decided it was worth saving: the writer Rina Durante founded the Canzoniere Gre- canico Salentino in 1975, the first ensemble to take the pizzica seriously and still going strong fifty years on. In 1998, a handful of Salento towns began a small festival to keep the dying tradition breathing, the Notte della Taranta, which has since swelled into the largest folk festival in Italy. This ideal summer pil- g r i m a g e t h r o u g h G r i k o towns ends with the Concer- tone in Melpignano, where well over a hundred thou- sand people fill the piazza and the fields around it to dance until dawn, each year under a different maestro concertatore, who reweaves the old pizzica with orches- tras and guests from across the world. From a spider's bite in a barn to a hundred thousand dancers in a field: now, that's quite a journey! And this is, perhaps, the most moving part about the Grecìa Salentina: this is a corner of Italy that has spent t w o a n d a h a l f t h o u s a n d y e a r s l o s i n g t h i n g s – i t s G r e e k s l i p p i n g a w a y , i t s young leaving, its old life f a d i n g – b u t m a n a g e d t o hold on to all of it through nothing sturdier than songs and words. Griko survives because people kept singing it, and the ache of leaving survived because someone set it to music. For those of us whose families crossed an ocean and went on singing in the kitchen long after the words had begun to blur, the lesson is clear: a song can carry a whole world a very long way, and keep it safe t h e r e , l o n g a f t e r n e a r l y everything else has been let go. Kalinifta and Klama: the songs of Italy's Greek south LUCA SIGNORINI Advancing our Legacy: Italian Community Services CASA FUGAZI If you know of any senior of Italian descent in San Francisco needing assistance, please contact: ItalianCS.org | (415) 362-6423 | info@italiancs.com Italian Community Services continues to assist Bay Area Italian-American seniors and their families navigate and manage the resources needed to live healthy, independent and productive lives. Since Shelter-in-Place began in San Francisco, Italian Community Services has delivered over 240 meals, over 900 care packages and made over 2000 phone wellness checks for our seniors. Griko music is also connected to the pizzica and the taranta tradition (Image gener- ated using Adobe Illustrator AI)

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