PierCarlo Grimaldi
UNIVERSITY OF GASTRONOMIC SCIENCES

The Mighty Mother's Bones

A discussion of two anthropomorphic vineyard stones discovered in the Langhe

‘Le Langhe non si perdono’. (The Langhe won’t disappear.)
(Cesare Pavese, “I mari del Sud,” Le Poesie, Einaudi, Turin 1998)

1. Rural magical belief is a complex cultural system, one of the most significant indicators of meaning expressed by popular tradition. Both secular and religious authorities have on the one hand favored, supported and cultivated this vision of the world, and on the other have fought, in different eras and also recently, to eradicate these ‘superstitious,’ obscure, secret forms when they no longer seemed organic and functional to cultural models of development.
That some belief in magic has never been completely defeated, and indeed returns to existence from time to time, demonstrating unexpected forms of vital topicality, is a well-known fact that enters into the renewal of tradition as a cultural resource for the individual who lives in social complexity. It is a phenomenon that has taken on multi-media characteristics and which can be verified on a daily basis by observing people’s continuing ‘superstitious’ behavior. The magical interpretation of the world, from personal events to more general occurrences, moves back its invisible borders, defining and carving out different forms of human nature, depending on the conquests and certainties of science. Magical reason begins where scientific reason leaves off, helping to interpret and accept what does not find comprehension, explanation and solutions in the rational.

2. Vesime lies in the austere, rugged zone of the Langhe that runs from Cuneo to Asti. Here two anthropomorphic sandstone steles, a male and a female, the remains of ancient posts placed at the head of vineyard rows, were discovered in the 1970s. They represent interesting folkloric evidence of the rural belief in magic that was deeply rooted in these hills as recently as the first half of the twentieth century.
Here orality, the gesture and the word constituted the traditional evolutionary lexicon of the countryside’s subalternity. In the Camongin vineyard, on the Paroldi hill, over twenty pairs of these head posts supported the same number of rows, making for a unique and extraordinary vineyard. In 1980, when I had the chance to observe the only two remaining stones, placed at the edge of the vineyard that had been their home, the head posts had been replaced by wooden poles. By then the vineyard defined and bounded by anthropomorphic stones had disappeared decades previously. But the memory of this particular vineyard had made an impression on the folkloric collective imagination of the country people who lived in this ‘wild’ part of the high Langhe hills, and was still alive in the memory of the most elderly. Cìa dij Barbàn, the woman who owned the vineyard, was then 81-years-old. Showing amazement at my interest, she told me that the vineyard was still functioning during the years of World War II. Then it was replanted and the stone posts were destroyed or taken away. The old woman did not know who had set up the rows with the supporting stone posts. She remembered that in her youth there was talk of people who passed the winter in the hills and who worked with stone. They were the picapére, or stonemasons, and in exchange for a plate of polenta they would carve the sandstone that the peasants had set aside during the plowing of the earth. The carvers made mortars, sinks and basins for feeding and watering the animals. Probably they also sculpted the Camongin vineyard’s stones. Interviewed at the same time, Cìa’s son Aldo Bodrito, of the Paroldi farm next to the vineyard, confirmed the presence of the twenty rows which made the vineyard unique and also in many ways disquieting and inexpressible.
It seems that the twenty pairs of anthropomorphic stones that were torn down when the vineyard was replanted remained on the edges of the new rows for a long time. In 1961 the new Paroldi hill road was laid, rising from Vesime towards Scorrone, an outlying hamlet of Cossano Belbo, in the neighboring Valle del Belbo, and replacing the narrow, winding old road. Apparently some of the masons who built the supporting walls of the new road used carved stones from the Camongin vineyard. Vestiges of the stones can also be found at the Val dell’Occhio fountain, not far from the vineyard, where originally there were two carved stones supporting the entrance to the fountain. The right-hand one has been stolen and replaced by a round stone. The one placed on the left of the fountain remains, and could be the upper part of a stone carved with a female face, a precious remnant of the anthropomorphic posts that were lost when the vineyard was cut down. Alternatively, the statue could have been made purposely to decorate the fountain by the same hand that carved the vineyard stones.
In popular culture, fountains are the places of the community most likely to be the site of magical happenings. This is where fairies and other mythical creatures reside, according to the popular collective imagination. Our woman, who most likely was paired with a male stele, presided over this symbolic place and also alluded to the fervid nocturnal imagination that characterized the traditional life of the Langhe hills. The darkness of the night gave rise to an extensive oral literature populated by masche, witches with whom the peasants coexisted with terror and respect. During moonlit nights, the vineyard and the fountain, disturbingly animated by the anthropomorphic stones, must truly have seemed to the solitary wayfarer to be places where the magical imagination became reality.
What remains are the two stones observed at the end of the 1970s, the vivid memory of the conversations with Cìa and Aldo and photographic documentation. (1) The only remaining pair of stone posts had already been sold for a low price. Only the interest of Vesime’s deputy mayor, who even then had realized the anthropological importance of popular objects back when there was barely a murmur about the cultural heritage produced by the rural world, had brought back the pair of anthropomorphic stones to the vineyard and placed them next to the wooden posts. Over the next decades, I returned many times to this subject that had captured my imagination, but I did not manage to add any further specific facts that would have enabled me to go beyond the already gathered information. In the meantime, while the idea of reconsidering this ‘stone vineyard’ was maturing, the stele representing the woman disappeared. The loss of the female figure that had been paired with the masculine one made my commitment to investigate and communicate this small but significant discovery even more important and essential, this discovery that seems to symbolically refer to deep cultures, to a rural world by now abandoned and distant, to a different space and time, to a remnant, a relic of a lost world that, with the disappearance of the last female stone, risks falling into oblivion, taking with it an archeological mystery as important as it is unresolved.

3. Starting from this find, I extended the search out to the most far-reaching Langhe vineyards and I discovered that traces of uncarved stone head posts could still be found in the hills next to Castino, Rocchetta Belbo, Cossano Belbo and Castiglione Tinella. This is a small and uniform area compared to the sea of vineyards that covers the hills of southern Piedmont. The same investigation carried out now led to just fleeting traces of this Langhe vineyard landscape, held only in the memory of the elderly. For example, the stone posts that still support the old vineyards of the Valle d’Aosta and the Val d’Ossola doubtlessly refer to the same magical-symbolic model that we recognize in the two vineyard stones from Vesime, but they lack the explicit and reinforcing signs of magical belief that we find in the Vesime workmanship. It is, however, interesting to note that in the Valle d’Aosta the stones are sometimes engraved with the vineyard’s date of planting, and sometimes with the initials of the owner. Oral testimonies collected from the valley’s farmers rationalize the use of stones as head posts because during the night they release the heat accumulated during the day, avoiding harmful temperature fluctuations which can impair the ripening of the grapes growing in sometimes extreme climatic conditions, such as in the valley’s highest vineyards. This property is particularly recognized in the stone and mortar columns that hold up topie, arbors. The explanation justifies the size and grandeur of the pillars that exceed the weight of the vineyard to be supported. (2)
In Carema, a village in the province of Turin on the bordering with the Val d’Aosta, the grapes ripen at up to 700 meters above sea level, supported by stone columns that raise them up towards the sky. Steep terraces hold up the topie on which grapes for the wine of the same name are cultivated. It is a strange, aweinspiring landscape, whose stones ensure the warmth necessary for the grapes to ripen.
If this is all we can find, then direct information about the two discovered stones appears scarce. Therefore, it is necessary to start from the few available details and attempt a circumstantial course of reasoning that allows the discovery to be inserted into a more solid anthropological context.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, phylloxera arrived from America. It spread through the French vineyards before arriving in Italy and the hills of southern Piedmont. The protective measures adopted by the Consorzio Antifillosserico Subalpino (Subalpine Antiphylloxera Consortium) had little success and it was necessary to turn to immune American rootstock, onto which indigenous varieties were grafted. The disease fatally struck the hills’ vineyards and forced generations of peasants to emigrate across the ocean. As Carlo Petrini says, ‘This emigration has a specific name: phylloxera’ (2008). Those who remained began a long struggle of trench warfare. It was a war between farmer and disease that would last many years, and was still being fought in the years following World War I, when soldiers stopped digging trenches on the Austro-Hungarian front and started digging similar trenches on their home hills to fight an invisible enemy, in its own way as insidious and as dangerous as that fought on the battlefield. Precious evidence from this dramatic, epic period of hunger and poverty can be found in the research conducted by Nuto Revelli. Giuseppe Bassignana, born in 1896 in Murazzano, in the high Langhe hills in the province of Cuneo, recalled who helped the peasants to defeat phylloxera in an interview given to Revelli in 1970. ‘Einaudi, the professor, the great economist, was an example to the local farmers here. In 1900 phylloxera had appeared and no one was frightened.
Einaudi, che i’ era ‘n gran filun, (3) an outstanding landowner, immediately understood and replaced all his vines. He knew the procedure to get money from the government and he set an example for the other farmers, otherwise phylloxera would still be eating our vineyards today’ (Revelli, 1977, vol. II, p. 159).
Elderly farmers, interviewed during the 1970s, still remembered the despair when the vine leaves began to die. ‘It was the sign that we were finished, that the disease had attacked the roots of the vines. The hills were painted with the color of death and for us it was over’. The people even turned to fire to fight the disease. ‘Matilde Balbo of Cossano Belbo recalls that to avoid passing the infection from one vine to another, her father Pietro lit a bonfire an cò dla vigna, at the top of the vineyard, and then sterilized all the asiamente, the tools, passing them through the fire: “We did the same with our shoes and my mother Rosalia even set fire to the scarf she wore on her head in the attempt to disinfect everything.”’ (Grimaldi, 1983, p. 39).
For the farmer there was nothing to do but destroy the sick vineyard and prepare the soil for new vines with the phylloxeraimmune American rootstock. Long trenches as deep ‘as a man’ were dug on the steep hill slopes. Up to a meter and a half deep, they were the source of the stones that were needed to build the low dry-stone walls that still support the Langhe’s most inaccessible vineyards. The deep digging was done with simple tools like spades, shovels, axes, mallets and wedges. When the rock became more compact and dense, gunpowder was used to break up the veins of stone. The results of the exhausting work were long stones that the peasants put aside to turn into useful objects for the farmhouse like basins and sinks, and also the vineyard head posts that they would have raised. Vesime is surrounded by vineyards coaxed out of the steep hill slopes using many low dry-stone walls. The walls are marked out by stone arches to support the earth and prevent it from washing away in landslides, allowing water to flow freely through the space under the arch. Long veins of stone were probably found here, particularly in the Camongin vineyard. It is plausible that when bedding out the phylloxera-immune American rootstock, the peasant who had been digging ditches for the vines in the winter cold, taking advantage of the moonlight to hurry up the long, unproductive work of preparing the land, would have thought to turn to the protective magic of the stones. Maybe he would have agreed to an itinerant picapére giving the stones a face, leaving the magic signs of an archaic understanding of the earth that perhaps was only partially expressible at that time, as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Next to the certainties that came with the American vines, which the farmer still had to put to the test, the practice of turning to magical customs strengthened by popular culture was not scorned. On the other hand, the rhythms of the vineyard, like those of nature in general, are still marked by the lunar phases and farmers still abide by and turn to them to ensure a good result for the harvest. A desperate but logical attempt by the farmer to attest—as Ernesto De Martino holds (1948)—to ‘being in the world’ when faced with the danger of ‘not being’.

4. If that is how things are, we will quickly see how much stone is part of the magical world of rural traditions. Humans started along the path of civilization by using and adapting stone to their needs. The first constitutive rhythms of space and time generated by humans (4) came from the use of stone and led to the prehistory of humanity known, indeed, as the Stone Age. Stone represents an important extension of the hand, amplifying human strength, serving as the first shelter, helping humans with work and defense. Because of its duration, outliving historical eras, and its function, it became a symbol of eternity, of the sacred, the incorruptible.
Thrones, symbols of royalty and power, were carved out of boulders. The cornerstone was the foundation of every house and sacred place. The rural world has interwoven a profound magical dialogue with stones. To pass through a rock crevice was believed to cure illnesses, just as sliding down a smooth boulder shaped like a chute supposedly encourages fertility in women. The magical contact between stone and the genitals allows the fertile properties of mother earth to pass to an infertile woman.
This particular magical practice has been widely documented in our local hills. At Cisterna d’Asti a large boulder along the road which leads to the hill called Brich di Ce, in the hamlet of Sant’Anna, is recognized as a place where women and midwives from the community and nearby villages would come to get children.
Women who could not get pregnant would slide on their naked buttocks down the fertility stone. Confirmation of the oral tradition still practiced at the turn of the nineteenth century remains in the formulaic expression men would say when a pregnant woman passed by: ‘Did you see? A l’à squarà, she slid on the stone’. Lino Vaudano still remembers how as a child he would go with his friends to listen to the boulder and hear the children cry.
The research conducted by Robert Hertz at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Val Soana is important evidence of the practice of curing bodily ills and sterility. Hertz documented the pilgrimage that the mountain people would undertake every year. A crowd of people would climb to 2,000 meters, where there was a chapel dedicated to San Besso, which ‘is almost joined to the great rock that dominates it; behind the altar a ladder leaning against the wall leads to the heart of the mountain. The faithful climb up and chip away at the rock with a knife to remove small pieces which they devoutly carry home. They are called “the stones of San Besso” and are considered relics. In normal times they are kept at home as talismans, but in times of danger, for example during wartime, they are carried around, or when a family member is ill, they are given water to drink in which the stone has been dipped, or they swallow a few flakes. It is an infallible remedy, but, according to the expression used by the mountain people, “it must not be mocked, faith and trust are needed”. When the celebration was over and the crowd scattered, the pilgrims, still filled with the virtues of the rock, descended down to their various villages, bringing their precious treasures with them. One would say that San Besso accompanied them and that, being dispersed without being lost, he takes up residence in every house where he is venerated’ (Hertz, 1994, p. 173).
I have quoted Hertz at length because he describes and analyses this magicalreligious practice in an exemplary way, and adds another folkloristic thought which is very interesting: ‘some, men and women, rubbed their backs against the rock to cure both pain and sterility’ (Hertz, 1994, pp. 172-173). It is well known that fertility is a general problem which concerns the plant, animal and human world. The future of the farm was guaranteed only if the family had many children, ideally boys, because their work brought continuity to the land. A complex magical-religious strategy is therefore connected to reproductive success. Rural churches, cult places for praying for divine help to encourage the farm’s fertility, are still recognizable. In Cortazzone, near Asti, in the midst of southern Piedmont’s vineyards, the twelfth-century Romanesque church dedicated to San Secondo is the site of extraordinary marks that clearly refer to procreation. An explicit depiction of sexual relations is carved onto the external wall, next to the traces of a castrated phallus, a figure displaying its genitals and a pair of breasts. Using a language understandable by the ‘primitive’ rural world that lived in the traditional countryside, the excess of signs present in the sacred place explicitly communicates that in this church the farming family could find help for any problem linked to fertility and reproduction. (5) The breasts indicate that one could ask the Virgin present in the church for an abundance of milk which would permit the mother to breastfeed her children.

5. I have briefly outlined a few magicalreligious functions that stone assumes in traditional cultures. A profound folkloric wisdom is connected to stone and is also identifiable in the historical and geographical area where the discovery was made. The two anthropomorphic steles, the vineyard posts, are part of the symbolic framework just described. The two stones that I had the opportunity to photograph at the end of the 1970s show a simple human intervention, made by someone using the few, simple rustic tools available to work the stone in a very artisan way. At the same time the male and female faces reveal a certain artistic simplicity, the practice of a ‘primitive’ popular art. Additionally the stone woman, as I already said, is pregnant. This feature becomes symbolically magnified if we observe her in profile, the shape of the nape of the neck seeming to recall a lunar phase that opposes and breaks the phallic structure of the male. This condition enhances the magical vigor that the pair already possessed by being at the head of every row. Twenty pairs of stone figures which, in the effort of supporting the vineyard, express the power and strength of youth and at the same time virility and reproductive femininity, and with this the connection the moon has with the vitality of the fields.
Pursuing the theme of the moon would be a long and fruitful journey, made with the intention of integrating the Vesime steles with the mythical model that the moon brings with it. If we only look at the data bank regarding the ‘Rules of the rural world connected to the moon’ in the volume Il calendario rituale contadino (The Calendar of Rural Rites), we note that it is particularly work in the vineyards and winemaking which require the greatest attention to the changing of the lunar phases (Grimaldi, 1993, pp. 311-325). The prohibitions concerning women (understood as lunar figures) can also be read in this context: menstruating women, for example, cannot pick grapes because the resulting wine will turn into vinegar. (6) As part of a profound popular signifying system, the anthropomorphic stones of Vesime also serve to explain and better interpret the presence of the stone posts that support the rows in the same historical and geographical area and in other parts of Piedmont. Emma Ghignone, from Cossano Belbo, recalls that the old people used to say that the vineyard stones served to protect against lightning and hail (Grimaldi, 1981, p. 119).
An interesting piece of information, which allows the Vesime stones to be connected to the magical interpretation that peasants gave to lightning stones. Until the early twentieth century, rural tradition held that where the thunderbolt struck it would leave its tip as a physical sign. This tip was a small stone, which represented an important resource for the farm of whoever found it, a magical object that provided protection from the dangerous summer storms. Turned towards the sky, it could stop lightning. In some ways the vineyard’s stone head posts performed the same task. If, during plowing, no long stones were found which could be used to support the rows, then small stones would be inserted into cracks in the wooden posts. These had the function of keeping away the lightning and with it the hail that could damage the vines and their fruit. This was how the people protected themselves against lòsna (lightning) in Santo Stefano Belbo, next to Vesime (Grimaldi, 1981, p. 119). The lightning tips—sometimes prehistoric axe heads and awls that were found in the fields—were jealously guarded by the farmers as magical objects to be used against the storms that threatened hail. In Cossano Belbo they were called pera dla lòsna, in Belvedere Langhe sfolgorina or ponta dla sfolgor. Sometimes the peasants found ‘the devil’s fingernail’ at the point where lightning hit. In Marsaglia, Laura Chiecchio’s father found one ‘in 1925, in a plant hit by lightning’ (Grimaldi, 1981, p. 121). According to Euclide Milano, whose information comes from Memorie storiche sull’antichità di Dogliani (Historical memories about ancient times in Dogliani) by Giacinto Gabutti (1888): ‘The sfolgorine are preserved and kept in the house as talismans to protect against lightning. They are called sfolgorine because they are believed to have fallen with the lightning itself and to have properties against it. Certain triangular shark’s teeth found in the tuff, from marine sediments formed by the sea’s long and calm sojourn over our land, are also called by the same name’ (Milano, 1958).
This apotropaic and mimetic magical system, with the function of both protecting and transmitting fertility to the vineyard, leads us to extend the symbolic framework not just to the viticultural landscape but also to the end result: wine. On the one hand wine is an agricultural product which more than any other participates in the sphere of the sacred. It is a constitutive part of the divine sacrifice fulfilled in the sacred act of mass, changing into the blood of Christ and spiritually nourishing the priest and the faithful. In this context the Vesime vineyard, which no longer exists, seems to me a faint but important trace of a sacred participating in the miracle of wine that brings its liturgical transformation closer and makes it more expressible. From this circumstantial viewpoint I like to think that the painting high up in the central apse of the Abbey of Staffarda of the anthropomorphic sun taking the place of the Christ Pantocrator, with a nose that declares a joyous drunkenness, is also in some way connected by invisible folkloric threads to the Vesime vineyard stones, and the result of a magical belief that characterized the popular religiousness of a profound rural past.
In a small area of the Asti hills I rediscovered and reconstructed the ritual practice of killing the wolf (Grimaldi, 1996, pp. 43-93). About ten days before the start of the harvest the farmer would say that he was going to kill the wolf. This formulaic expression referred to the action of going to the vineyard and picking the first ripe grapes to make wine. The symbolic act belongs to the ritual system connected to the practice of the primizie, the first portion of the harvest which would be offered to the gods. The farmer, who had been active throughout the agricultural season that was about to conclude, not just with his work but also turning to a profound ritual and symbolic system in order for nature to ripen abundant fruits, perceived himself as a bringer of death, as Ernesto De Martino (1958) explains well. To avoid killing the spirit of the grapes, he performed the preharvest ‘of the wolf’ which allowed a ritual overcoming of the mythical conflict underway, of the sacred dispute between humans and nature that had accumulated over the course of the agrarian year. This ritual contrivance allowed the magical wealth which the vineyard had amassed during the agricultural year to be weakened, and the bunch of grapes cut with a knife is no more than a simple gesture towards an inanimate nature. If we want to transport the practice of the ritual harvest documented in the Asti hills and belonging to the same vast area that includes the hills of southern Piedmont (to me it seems methodologically correct), then the action of ‘killing the wolf’ in the vineyard presided over by the anthropomorphic end posts, the oral and gestural formularity of the pre-harvest, allows the avoidance of a quarrel with the anthropomorphic stones, to not kill our ancestors, who have protected the vineyard and made it fertile over the course of the seasons.

6. At the end of the circumstantial path that has allowed me to elaborate some anthropological conjectures, starting from the fleeting immaterial fragments of memory and traces of material culture, in this space and in this time—that of the Vesime vineyard stones—we can still attempt to opportunely integrate the reasons for the existence of this particular folkloric trait. Beyond the anthropological path which we have followed, a further contribution to the understanding of this small but significant mystery produced by popular culture can be found in the Greek story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, which seems to mythically reveal the deepest undercurrent of the magical belief that pervades the rediscovered anthropomorphic stones. The human features, the faces that come out of the stone, appear to recall the humanity that arises from the ritual gesture of Deucalion and Pyrrha throwing stones behind them. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only survivors of the Flood, desperately begging for help from the goddess Themis, who predicts the future. Moved by their great suffering the goddess says: ‘Depart, and with your vestments veil your head: / And stooping lowly down, with losen’d zones, / Throw each behind your backs, your mighty mother’s bones’. The oracular response does not require that they throw the bones of their own mothers, as the two young people initially believe, but those of Mother Earth: ‘Descending from the mount, they first unbind / Their vests, and veil’d, they cast the stones behind: / The stones (a miracle to mortal view, / But long tradition makes it pass for true) / Did first the rigour of their kind expel, / And suppled into softness, as they fell; / Then swell’d, and swelling, by degrees grew warm; / And took the rudiments of human form. / Imperfect shapes: in marble such are seen, / When the rude chizzel does the man begin; / While yet the roughness of the stone remains, / Without the rising muscles, and the veins. / The sappy parts, and next resembling juice, / Were turn’d to moisture, for the body’s use: / Supplying humours, blood, and nourishment; / The rest, too solid to receive a bent, / Converts to bones; and what was once a vein, / Its former name and Nature did retain. / By help of pow’r divine, in little space, / What the man threw, assum’d a manly face; / And what the wife, renew’d the female race. / Hence we derive our nature; born to bear / Laborious life; and harden’d into care’.
Reading this passage from Ovid, one can almost see the stones emerging from the excavation of the Camongin vineyard, and little by little, assuming ‘the rudiments of human form’. It is a narrative which recognizes in the hardness of the stone that ‘Hence we derive our nature; born to bear / Laborious life; and harden’d into care’. We are almost invited to think about the tough people of the Langhe, whose epic digging to replant the phylloxeraimmune vines unearthed the stones to support and restore to production hills whose steepness made them unfit for cultivation. The anthropomorphic stones, twenty pairs, male-female, which explicitly allude to fertility because of the woman’s visible pregnancy, are therefore our relations, still following the myth narrated by Ovid; the telluric spirits that protect the living, giving vigor, fertility and fruitfulness to the vines. They are totemic posts ruling over the viticultural cycle because of their statuesque imposing nature. They give a face to our ancestors, who, participating in a collective effort, share in an alliance with the living, to defeat phylloxera and more generally to make great these hills of vines and wines. A commitment not yet exhausted that apparently still survives in the Langhe hills where in some places wine still seems to be made in collaboration with the spirits of the land, where wine still represents the outcome of a complex and successful material and immaterial miracle, where tradition is still a successful innovation (Montanari, 2006).
Through objective and mythical evidence, a comprehensive reading has permitted certain folkloric features of the Vesime vineyard stones to come to light, to resurface from the oblivion. These features will be further investigated and explored, seeking to compare the information and the results with other areas with similar magical forms and practices.
A promising debate on the need to protect biodiversity was launched recently (Petrini, 2007). At the same time and with the same commitment we need to launch an equally urgent debate, and not only in anthropological terms, about ethnodiversity. We must see to it that the wisdom of tradition is rescued, preserved and reproposed, even starting from this small but symbolic hierophany from the Langhe, from this little lost vineyard where faint traces of the sacred remain, evidenced and materialized—as Mircea Eliade (1957) would say—in the anthropomorphic stone posts, the relationship between the earth and the sky, the axis mundi of a rural universe that with the help of its magical knowledge has contributed to support the world in which foolishly we believe, albeit less and less.

7.The photographs taken in 1979 are the visual evidence of the last pair of anthropomorphic posts.
Words are not enough to describe the fascination held by the female stele, in her almost oxymoronic simplicity and procreative glory, and so, based on these precious photographs, a ‘modern picapére’ is turning the stone woman into reality. The initial results are very promising and to see this mythical figure reborn and restored to life lifts the heart and allows, in some way, the processing of the grief felt after hearing about her recent disappearance. The anthropomorphic pair, exhibited and discussed as part of Terra Madre 2008, presents to food producers from all over the world what remains of a popular art that arose in a small vineyard in the high, rugged hills of the Langhe. It is a mysterious sign left by a rural culture, which, until now, we have not managed to fully compare with other similar artistic expressions from other rural worlds. For many of the reasons which I have attempted to elaborate during this essay, I have a desire to bring the anthropomorphic posts found in Vesime closer to the Moai of Easter Island. It is an inadmissible comparison, but still fascinating and stimulating, and in some ways legitimate. The Langhe wine steles become physically small, almost disappearing in front of the enormous, imposing guardian stones of the island on the other side of the world. But if we analyze them according to the magical belief they represent, we discover that they are, in all probability, the same thing. Both have an intrinsic expressive power and bring with them a disquieting and profound unresolved mystery that finds its most general explanation in the magical thought that tradition elaborates in every part of the world and which becomes a common denominator of the evolutionary constitutive rhythms of time and space produced by gesture and speech.
It is too easy to identify in the Moai the most transparent mark of Easter Island’s identity. At the same time I believe that the stone posts, which with their mythical authority define the time and space protected by the Camongin vineyard, will become the sign of a collective identity of these unique hills marked by the geometry of rows. The recent proposal to categorize southern Piedmont’s viticultural landscape as a UNESCO World Heritage Site is a step in this direction.
The presentation of the stones at Salone del Gusto–Terra Madre this October provides an opportunity to announce the exhibition ‘Le divinità del vino. Le pietre della magia contadina’ (The deities of wine and the stones of rural magic) sponsored by the Piedmont Regional Authority, which will be held at Turin’s Natural Sciences Museum from December 2008 to January 2009.

NOTES

1) Photographs of the Vesime stone posts can be found in Grimaldi, 1993, pp. 298-299.

2) I would like to thank the geologist Franco Bonetto for kindly passing on the information about the Valle d’Aosta vineyard stones.

3) ‘… who was a smart fellow …’

4) For more on the evolutionary rhythms of humans in space and time see André Leroi- Gourhan (1993).

5) On the complex and little explored relationship between profane art and popular religiousness in the Middle Ages, see Gaignebet and Lajoux (1985).

6) Interview conducted in Pozzuoli (Naples) by Salvatore D’Onofrio. The information is part of a paper given by D’Onofrio at the international conference ‘Riti mediterranei’ (Mediterranean rites) held in Palermo in May 2008.

References

De Martino, E., Il mondo magico. Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo, Einaudi, Turin 1948.

De Martino, E., Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico, Einaudi, Turin 1958.

Eliade, M., The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, Brace & World, New York 1957.

Gabutti, G., Memorie storiche sull’antichità di Dogliani. Stato attuale, clima, prodotti naturali, Tipografia Municipale Ottino, Dogliani 1888.
Gaignebet, C. and Lajoux, J.-D., Art profane et religion populaire au moyen âge. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1985.

Grimaldi, P., ‘Le pietre della magia’, in Marsico, G. and Grimaldi, P., La pietra, Ferrero Omega, Turin, n.d. but 1981, pp. 118-123.

Grimaldi, P., ‘I ferri contadini’, in Marsico, G.; Grimaldi, P. Il ferro, Ferrero Omega, Turin, n.d. but 1983, pp. 38-67.

Grimaldi, P., Il calendario rituale contadino. Il tempo della festa e del lavoro fra tradizione e complessità sociale, Angeli, Milan 1993.

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