L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 14 L'Italo-Americano LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE T he sound was not a l o v e l y o n e . D o w n a v i l l a g e l a n e o n a c o l d winter afternoon, somewhere in the flat coun- try of the Po, a low, droning, cavernous groan would rise, closer to the grunt of an ani- mal than to anything you would call music. Yet, every child in the parish knew at o n c e w h a t i t m e a n t : t h e t o r o t o t e l a h a d c o m e t o t o w n . T o b e t r u t h f u l , t h e noise was half the fun: it announced, better than any bell, that the traveling man with the strange instrument and the stranger stories had arrived, and that the long grey monotony of a farming winter was about to be bro- ken. The instrument that made that groan is one of the least a s s u m i n g e v e r p l a y e d i n Italy, yet it's one of the most wonderful at the same time. Strip it to its parts and you have almost nothing: a single thick string of gut, a rough wooden stick or bow to draw across it, and, for a sound- ing-box, either a dried gourd or, better still, the inflated bladder of a pig. That is the whole thing. The bladder, blown up tight and dried, turns the scrape of the string into a deep, buzzing drone, and gives the torototela both its voice and its unforget- table name in English: the p i g - b l a d d e r f i d d l e . I t belongs, as it happens, to a whole European family of such instruments, the "blad- d e r f i d d l e s " t h a t c o u n t r y people improvised from a stick, a string, and whatever animal part came to hand. The name comes from the v e r y s o u n d t h i s h u m b l e instrument makes, as toro- totela is pure onomatopoeia, an imitation of its rolling, guttural drone; yet, toro- totela was also the name of the player, who would usual- ly lean into the joke of it, working his own name into an endless singsong refrain, "torototela, torototà," until it became his signature and, s o m e s a y , t h e r e a s o n s o many of his rhymes ended on that same braying "à". T h e t o r o t o t e l a ( p l a y e r ! ) would come up the road with two big sacks over his shoul- ders and a knot of children already trailing behind him, sawing at his one string and c a l l i n g o u t t h a t h e h a d arrived. He was far more than a musician, though: he was a w a l k i n g n e w s p a p e r , a o n e - m a n t h e a t e r , t h e entertainment and news ser- vice of places that had nei- ther. In the Po Valley and a c r o s s t h e n o r t h o f I t a l y , when the fields froze and there was no more work to be done, these itinerant play- ers would leave home and set off from village to village, house to house, farm to farm, and in exchange for a few coins, a meal, or a place by the fire, they would sing what they knew. And they knew everything, or claimed to, at least: the doings of kings and g o v e r n m e n t s , a f a m o u s crime three provinces away, a scandal, a war, a bit of local gossip dressed up in verse, a l l o f i t i m p r o v i s e d i n t o rhyming couplets over that endless grunting drone. In isolated hamlets where news arrived by no other route, the torototela was a welcome guest at weddings and feast days, and people gathered c l o s e t o h e a r t h e w o r l d explained, and mocked, by a man with a pig's bladder and a quick tongue. The instrument changed i t s s h a p e f r o m r e g i o n t o region, as folk things do: in Veneto, it was sometimes built around a curved stick w i t h t h e s t r i n g s t r e t c h e d between its ends and a wine- gourd, the zucca violina, wedged in as a bridge. In P i e d m o n t i t t o o k o t h e r forms, sometimes fitted out with bristles and little deco- rations, but always with that e m p t y g o u r d o r b l a d d e r doing the work of a violin's whole body. It was above all a creature of winter and of Carnival, of the dark idle season when a community needed noise and laughter and a reason to open the door to a stranger. That world, of course, did not survive the century: the radio arrived, and then the television, and a man who carried the news on his back a n d s e t i t t o a d r o n e h a d nothing left to sell. One by one the old torototela play- ers laid down their gourds, u n t i l o n l y a h a n d f u l o f names were remembered as the last of the line, keepers of a trade that the twentieth century had made obsolete. F o r a l o n g s t r e t c h t h e strange grunt fell silent alto- gether. B u t i t d i d n ' t v a n i s h , because the torototela has been rediscovered in recent years by folk musicians, fes- tival performers, and the patient people of the sound- heritage museums, among them the Museo del Pae- saggio Sonoro in Riva di Chieri, Piedmont, which col- lect these homemade instru- ments and coax them back to life. Once again, here and there, you can hear that low, buzzing, unmusical groan roll down a street and know that the traveling man has come with his stories. It is not a beautiful sound, and perhaps it was never meant t o b e ; i n t h e e n d , i t w a s meant to make you look up, open the door, and listen to what the world had been get- ting up to while you placidly w o r k e d i n t h e f i e l d s a n d e n j o y e d t h e p e a c e f u l rhythms of your village. Torototela, torototà: the traveling storyteller of the Po Valley 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. A traveling torototela player entertains villagers with the instrument's distinctive drone and his improvised stories (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI)

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