L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JULY 9, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 10 L'Italo-Americano T here is a particu- l a r s o u n d t h a t used to fill cer- tain Italian hill t o w n s a n d h a s almost entirely gone out of the world: the ringing of a hammer on copper, struck thousands of times until a flat disc of metal swells slow- ly into a pot or a pan. In the little town of Force, in the M a r c h e , u p i n t h e g r e e n f o o t h i l l s o f t h e S i b i l l i n i Mountains, that sound was once the pulse of the place: they called it, and still call it, il borgo del rame, the village of copper, and though the workshops long fell silent, the town decided its copper- smiths are worth remember- ing. Force sits about 2,260 feet up, on a high spur of land where the valleys of the Aso and the Tesino rivers divide, and its very name seems to come from that geography, that is, from forca, the fork, for the town's perch at the parting of the ways. People took shelter on this hilltop as far back as the fifth century, in the unsettled years of the barbarian invasions, when a defensible height was worth more than good soil. Today about a thousand people live here, in a tidy medieval knot of stone lanes and gate-tow- ers, one of which still bears the town's odd little coat of arms, two chains crossed like the letter X, the cross of Saint Andrew. The copper came later, and no one is quite sure how. One story credits the monks of the great abbey of Farfa, who held land in these parts and may have brought the c r a f t w i t h t h e m ; a n o t h e r , more colorful, traces it to bands of Roma who settled on the territory and worked m e t a l a s t h e y h a d a l w a y s done. Whatever the truth, by the nineteenth century the trade had made Force locally f a m o u s , a n d n u m b e r s explain why: a survey from 1892 counted twenty-eight coppersmiths' workshops in the town, employing sixty-six men, all of them beating cop- p e r t h a t a r r i v e d f r o m t h e foundries down in the valley of the Aso. In a place this small, it's easy to see copper ran the economy. What the ramai, the cop- persmiths, made was above all the humble hardware of a farmhouse kitchen, so caul- drons and pans, pails and measures, the great copper v e s s e l s i n w h i c h f a m i l i e s once cooked and preserved. But their masterpiece, the object that made them indis- pensable, was a strange and beautiful contraption called in the local dialect a tam- b u r l à : a c o p p e r s t i l l , a l l curves and coiled tubing, built to distill wine into mis- t r à , t h e a n i s e l i q u e u r beloved across the Marche. In the eighteenth century, the coppersmiths of Force were said to be the only arti- sans anywhere around who knew how to build one, and a farmer who wanted to turn h i s w i n e i n t o s o m e t h i n g s t r o n g e r h a d t o c o m e t o them. But Force's coppersmiths did not only make things, they were often ambulanti, travelling men, carrying their tools and their wares from village to village and valley to valley, mending and selling as they went; and to protect the secrets of their trade, they invented a private lan- g u a g e , with a wonderful name, the baccagliamen- to forcese, from a dialect v e r b m e a n i n g t o m a k e a racket, and it was spoken only among those who dealt in copper. It was, basically, a code that let a coppersmith haggle, warn, or gossip in a crowded market while the customer didn't understand a word. Some of it survives in old lists, and it is a delight: in baccagliamento, shoes were li fancose, wine was lu frizzu, bread was lu réfë, a mouth was la morfa, hands were le vrancose, a horse lu strabur- tu, a dog lu martelliscu. A few of the words, if you turn t h e m o v e r , g i v e u p t h e i r m e a n i n g : l i f a n c o s e , t h e muddy ones, for shoes forev- er caked in the mud of the road; lu frizzu for a wine with a little sparkle to it; lu martelliscu, the little ham- merer, for a dog that will not s t o p b a r k i n g . O t h e r s a r e stranger, and are thought to carry a trace of Romani, a last echo of whoever first brought the fire and the anvil up the hill. No one speaks baccagliamento now; it died with the trade it was made to guard. A whole language that existed so a handful of men could earn a living, gone the moment the living went. Because the trade did go. T h e t i n p o t a n d t h e a l u - minum pan, the factory and the supermarket, did to the ramai what they did to vil- l a g e c o p p e r s m i t h s e v e r y - where, and one by one the workshops closed. But Force has refused to let the memo- ry rust, and in the vaulted u n d e r g r o u n d r o o m s o f Palazzo Canestrari, in the heart of the old town, the community opened a Muse- um of the Coppersmiths, the Museo dei Ramai, gath- ering up the pots and mea- s u r e s a n d g l e a m i n g t a m - burlà that the town's hands once made, along with the tools that shaped them. It belongs now to Italy's associ- ation of small museums, the sort of modest, heartfelt col- lection that a place assem- bles not for tourists but for itself, so that the grandchil- d r e n w i l l k n o w w h a t t h e grandfathers did. And on certain days the museum does something even better, it fires up a workshop and lets a visitor take the ham- m e r , f e e l t h e c o p p e r g i v e under the blow, and under- stand in the muscles what a t h o u s a n d l e d g e r s c o u l d never explain. There is more to see in Force than copper: the hand- s o m e C o l l e g i a t a d i S a n P a o l o , w h i c h o n c e h e l d a g r e a t a l t a r p i e c e b y t h e painter Cola dell'Amatrice, since broken up and scat- tered as far as the Vatican's galleries and, of all places, a m u s e u m i n K a n s a s ; t h e church and gate-tower of San Francesco; the odd little villa an Italian architect who h a d m a d e h i s f o r t u n e i n Egypt built just outside the walls in the 1930s. But it is t h e c o p p e r t h a t g i v e s t h e town its name and its soul: walk up one of those steep s t o n e l a n e s o n a s u m m e r afternoon, and the old sound seems to come back… the patient, ringing hammer that once made a whole village sing. F o r c e , t h e v i l l a g e o f c o p p e r , a n d t h e vanished language of its coppersmiths CHIARA D'ALESSIO ALL AROUND ITALY TRAVEL TIPS DESTINATIONS ACTIVITIES The hilltop village of Force, traditional copperworking, historic stills and household objects, the local dialect of the coppersmiths, and the Museo dei Ramai, where the town's centuries-old craft is preserved (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI)

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