Rites and social practices
Singing for the holy souls
The itinerant diasillari of Garrufo and Guazzano
“E Dijesilla Dijesilla, salve salve consivilla / My Jesus, in great sorrow, you have been the Redeemer. The creature will rise again from its ancient burial / surpassing the living and the dead, and there before us he is just and strong.” This is the opening of the Dijesilla performed by Giannina Malaspina and Marino Ciprietti, itinerant diasillari who, from Garrufo di Campli, carried this sung prayer across rural hamlets and scattered houses, on long journeys through the inland areas of Abruzzo and the Marche. Their voices resonated from house to house, from family to family, bringing solace to the souls of the dead and to the hearts of the living who kept their memory alive.
“We slept in people’s houses, or under makeshift shelters, inside carts, or where they kept the animals, on straw. We sang for the dead of each family — they would tell us the names. They wanted to hear the stories of Saint Anthony, of Saint Gabriel, the diasillë; they knew we did these things, and we were treated as one of the family. It was a hard life, but it was a good one: I met many people, and we were invited to weddings”.
Giannina Malaspina, 2 June 2009
In the area surrounding the municipality of Campli, particularly in hamlets such as Garrufo and Guazzano located along the routes leading towards the mountains, a well-established local custom led part of the population — especially men — to alternate a settled daily life with long seasonal journeys devoted to singing and performing in rural hamlets and scattered houses. This professional specialisation formed part of a broader system of itinerant activities, a long-standing feature of the town of Campli, whose inhabitants were engaged in the production and sale of “sacred images”, holy cards and small religious items in territories often far from their place of origin, following routes documented by oral testimonies and by records preserved in the State Archives of Teramo, as highlighted by the research of Nicolino Farina. The figures of the santarellaro and the storyteller, however, only rarely overlapped, although both belonged to a subsistence system based on periodic mobility: the former more often frequented urban squares and markets, while the musicians and storytellers of Campli — more properly defined as diasillari — preferred peripheral and less frequented areas, where it was easier to find hospitality and to enact their specific strategies of negotiation, based more on ceremonial exchange than on direct sale.
The diasillari of Campli also differ from the civic and creative engagement typical of square-based storytellers, embodying instead a fully itinerant ceremonial function directed towards the geographical and symbolic space of the margin — the inhabited periphery at the extreme boundary between the domestic and the wild. This constitutes a privileged dimension of interaction between the living and the dead, enacted through a form of ritually marked mobility that, over the centuries, has associated itinerant performers and mendicants with the world of the deceased and of wandering souls, a connection still widely perceptible in the religious imagination of rural Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.
Giannina Malaspina and Marino Ciprietti, among the most important diasillari of Campli, travelled together on their itinerant rounds of alms-seeking until the final decade of the last century. The identities of other diasillari from the area are also known, devoted to the performance of songs, prayers and orations for the souls in Purgatory, including Sabatino Di Pietro — better known as Sabatino di Campli — Gaetano Paterini, Giuseppe Di Odoardo, Giovannino and Tonino Giubbini, and Ernesto Di Francesco, to mention only some of those from Garrufo and Guazzano.
The ceremonial intention underlying the alms-seeking activity of Marino Ciprietti and Giannina Malaspina was expressed primarily through the extra-liturgical practice of performing, at the request of local inhabitants, a song for the dead of the household, whose names were pronounced each time in the penultimate stanza: Li diasille dei morti, also known as the Diasillë, a vernacular adaptation of the Latin sequence attributed to Thomas of Celano (1200–1265), the Dies Iræ, one of the best-known religious poems of Christian liturgy, included in the Roman Missal as the “sequence of the dead” and sung during funerals. The song and its ceremonial use, rooted in the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, offered the possibility of a symbolic exchange between the living and the dead, opening a space of communication with the “souls in Purgatory” awaiting Judgement. The diasillari of Campli were therefore regarded as intercessors with the dead of the household, through formulas and prayers intended to ease the suffering of the departed and ensure the continuation of bonds maintained during life, receiving in exchange gifts in kind or, later, money. Some, such as Sabatino di Campli, more frequently performed a recitative known as Il lamento del Purgatorio [The Lament of Purgatory], also called L’anime defunte [The Souls of the Dead], whose functions were similar to those of the Diasillë.
The performative repertoire of the diasillaro storyteller could also include stories of saints, which constituted one of the most significant points of convergence between a codified religious tradition and the genre of the ballad or rhymed narrative with extended storytelling, particularly widespread in central and southern Italy. The connection between saints and the dead is, moreover, one of the fundamental articulations of the relationship with death and of the ritual forms it assumes in Christian Europe, beginning precisely with the cult of saints understood as a particular category of chosen, illustrious and exceptional dead, recognised as miraculous benefactors.
The diasillari of Campli also differ from the civic and creative engagement typical of square-based storytellers, embodying instead a fully itinerant ceremonial function directed towards the geographical and symbolic space of the margin — the inhabited periphery at the extreme boundary between the domestic and the wild. This constitutes a privileged dimension of interaction between the living and the dead, enacted through a form of ritually marked mobility that, over the centuries, has associated itinerant performers and mendicants with the world of the deceased and of wandering souls, a connection still widely perceptible in the religious imagination of rural Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.
Giannina Malaspina and Marino Ciprietti, among the most important diasillari of Campli, travelled together on their itinerant rounds of alms-seeking until the final decade of the last century. The identities of other diasillari from the area are also known, devoted to the performance of songs, prayers and orations for the souls in Purgatory, including Sabatino Di Pietro — better known as Sabatino di Campli — Gaetano Paterini, Giuseppe Di Odoardo, Giovannino and Tonino Giubbini, and Ernesto Di Francesco, to mention only some of those from Garrufo and Guazzano.
The ceremonial intention underlying the alms-seeking activity of Marino Ciprietti and Giannina Malaspina was expressed primarily through the extra-liturgical practice of performing, at the request of local inhabitants, a song for the dead of the household, whose names were pronounced each time in the penultimate stanza: Li diasille dei morti, also known as the Diasillë, a vernacular adaptation of the Latin sequence attributed to Thomas of Celano (1200–1265), the Dies Iræ, one of the best-known religious poems of Christian liturgy, included in the Roman Missal as the “sequence of the dead” and sung during funerals. The song and its ceremonial use, rooted in the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, offered the possibility of a symbolic exchange between the living and the dead, opening a space of communication with the “souls in Purgatory” awaiting Judgement. The diasillari of Campli were therefore regarded as intercessors with the dead of the household, through formulas and prayers intended to ease the suffering of the departed and ensure the continuation of bonds maintained during life, receiving in exchange gifts in kind or, later, money. Some, such as Sabatino di Campli, more frequently performed a recitative known as Il lamento del Purgatorio [The Lament of Purgatory], also called L’anime defunte [The Souls of the Dead], whose functions were similar to those of the Diasillë.
The performative repertoire of the diasillaro storyteller could also include stories of saints, which constituted one of the most significant points of convergence between a codified religious tradition and the genre of the ballad or rhymed narrative with extended storytelling, particularly widespread in central and southern Italy. The connection between saints and the dead is, moreover, one of the fundamental articulations of the relationship with death and of the ritual forms it assumes in Christian Europe, beginning precisely with the cult of saints understood as a particular category of chosen, illustrious and exceptional dead, recognised as miraculous benefactors.
Dijesilla
Giannina Malaspina, accordion and voice; Marino Ciprietti, voice.
Macchie di Farindola (PE), 13 July 1993.
Recording by Domenico Di Virgilio,
Abruzzese EthnoLinguistic Musical Archive (AELMA).
Macchie di Farindola (PE), 13 July 1993.
Recording by Domenico Di Virgilio,
Abruzzese EthnoLinguistic Musical Archive (AELMA).
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In Honour of Saint Anthony
Giannina Malaspina and her grandson Francesco Di Carlo perform the song All’onore di Sant’Antonio during one edition of Valfino al Canto.
Arsita (TE), August 2010.
Footage by Andrea Zuin, Altofino/Rondilà Archive.
Arsita (TE), August 2010.
Footage by Andrea Zuin, Altofino/Rondilà Archive.
Cultural transmission and protection
The practice of domestic singing and recitation performed by the diasillari of the area of Campli — particularly those from Garrufo and Guazzano, from where most of them originated — has now completely disappeared. The diasillari themselves, custodians of the repertoires used during their journeys, have almost all passed away. From the perspective of transmission, it may be noted that in some cases, such as that of Giannina Malaspina, a certain continuity has been ensured within the family through her grandson Francesco Di Carlo, particularly with regard to the use of the accordion and to the repertoire of songs known by his maternal grandparents.
To this important direct transmission — which nevertheless remains an isolated case rather than a widespread inheritance among diasillari families — must be added a variety of initiatives of recovery and valorisation, potentially aimed at safeguarding the repertoires and fostering broader awareness of the context in which they were performed by these itinerant figures. For the area centred on the territory of the municipality of Campli as the main zone of diffusion of these repertoires, numerous recordings, studies and interpretative analyses have made it possible, to varying degrees, to achieve a broader understanding of the phenomenon. The earliest known recordings were made in Garrufo di Campli by the folklorist Giuseppe Profeta (1963) and by one of his students, Marilena Sinigaglia (1968–1970), documenting the sung prayer known as L’anime defunte [The Souls of the Dead], also called Il lamento del Purgatorio [The Lament of Purgatory], performed by Eleonora Di Pietro, sister of Sabatino Di Pietro, and described as “belonging to the repertoire of itinerant singers known as diasillari” (Archivio Sonoro Abruzzo). Profeta later documented sung and recited versions of the Diasillë in several villages of the Gran Sasso and Laga areas (1970, Istituto per i Beni Sonori ed Audiovisivi), where they had spread precisely through the itineraries of the diasillari from Campli. Sabatino Di Pietro himself was later documented in context by Italo Luciani near Scorrano, in the Middle Vomano Valley, during one of his long journeys on foot (1980), while Giannina Malaspina and Marino Ciprietti were the subject of an almost exhaustive documentation of their ceremonial repertoire — including sung prayers dedicated to Saint Rita of Cascia, Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows and Saint Anthony the Abbot — when they stayed with the Salzetta family in Macchie di Farindola, in the only known live recording of their performances made by the ethnomusicologist Domenico Di Virgilio (1993, Abruzzo Digital Archive).). Another sung version of the prayer Il lamento del Purgatorio was documented by the ethnomusicologist Carlo Di Silvestre in the same rural hamlet of Farindola, performed by Maria Salzetta, an elderly peasant woman who stated that she had learned it directly from the people of Campli (1993, Archivio Sonoro Abruzzo). Di Silvestre also documented several versions of the Diasillë in the Fino and Tavo valleys. This dissemination of repertoires carried out by the diasillari of Campli appears to be a constitutive feature of their role as cultural “bearers”, exercised over the centuries and still traceable in many of the territories they crossed. In Arsita and the surrounding area, for example, the song In onore di Sant’Antonio [In Honour of Saint Anthony] is still performed during the winter alms-seeking ritual of Saint Anthony the Abbot, having been transmitted by the itinerant singers from Campli during their long peregrinations; it also survives in local memory in the form of a prayer.
More recent research, together with sound, audiovisual and photographic documentation, has been carried out by the anthropologist Gianfranco Spitilli with Giannina Malaspina and her family. Through this work he reconstructed her biography and cultural context, also within a broader process of revitalisation and reinterpretation of the repertoires developed in collaboration with the ethnomusicologist Filippo Bonini Baraldi, resulting in a volume and a musical production dedicated to the subject (2017), as well as numerous public presentations and performances by Giannina Malaspina herself together with her grandson Francesco Di Carlo, including those held during the festival Valfino al Canto in Arsita and in theatres in Paris. At the origin of this renewed interest was the musical production of the group A’ssaltarella, of which Francesco Di Carlo was also a member, involving Giannina Malaspina and Marino Ciprietti in a short original recording and giving rise to an initial experiment in reinterpretation of their repertoire.
To this important direct transmission — which nevertheless remains an isolated case rather than a widespread inheritance among diasillari families — must be added a variety of initiatives of recovery and valorisation, potentially aimed at safeguarding the repertoires and fostering broader awareness of the context in which they were performed by these itinerant figures. For the area centred on the territory of the municipality of Campli as the main zone of diffusion of these repertoires, numerous recordings, studies and interpretative analyses have made it possible, to varying degrees, to achieve a broader understanding of the phenomenon. The earliest known recordings were made in Garrufo di Campli by the folklorist Giuseppe Profeta (1963) and by one of his students, Marilena Sinigaglia (1968–1970), documenting the sung prayer known as L’anime defunte [The Souls of the Dead], also called Il lamento del Purgatorio [The Lament of Purgatory], performed by Eleonora Di Pietro, sister of Sabatino Di Pietro, and described as “belonging to the repertoire of itinerant singers known as diasillari” (Archivio Sonoro Abruzzo). Profeta later documented sung and recited versions of the Diasillë in several villages of the Gran Sasso and Laga areas (1970, Istituto per i Beni Sonori ed Audiovisivi), where they had spread precisely through the itineraries of the diasillari from Campli. Sabatino Di Pietro himself was later documented in context by Italo Luciani near Scorrano, in the Middle Vomano Valley, during one of his long journeys on foot (1980), while Giannina Malaspina and Marino Ciprietti were the subject of an almost exhaustive documentation of their ceremonial repertoire — including sung prayers dedicated to Saint Rita of Cascia, Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows and Saint Anthony the Abbot — when they stayed with the Salzetta family in Macchie di Farindola, in the only known live recording of their performances made by the ethnomusicologist Domenico Di Virgilio (1993, Abruzzo Digital Archive).). Another sung version of the prayer Il lamento del Purgatorio was documented by the ethnomusicologist Carlo Di Silvestre in the same rural hamlet of Farindola, performed by Maria Salzetta, an elderly peasant woman who stated that she had learned it directly from the people of Campli (1993, Archivio Sonoro Abruzzo). Di Silvestre also documented several versions of the Diasillë in the Fino and Tavo valleys. This dissemination of repertoires carried out by the diasillari of Campli appears to be a constitutive feature of their role as cultural “bearers”, exercised over the centuries and still traceable in many of the territories they crossed. In Arsita and the surrounding area, for example, the song In onore di Sant’Antonio [In Honour of Saint Anthony] is still performed during the winter alms-seeking ritual of Saint Anthony the Abbot, having been transmitted by the itinerant singers from Campli during their long peregrinations; it also survives in local memory in the form of a prayer.
More recent research, together with sound, audiovisual and photographic documentation, has been carried out by the anthropologist Gianfranco Spitilli with Giannina Malaspina and her family. Through this work he reconstructed her biography and cultural context, also within a broader process of revitalisation and reinterpretation of the repertoires developed in collaboration with the ethnomusicologist Filippo Bonini Baraldi, resulting in a volume and a musical production dedicated to the subject (2017), as well as numerous public presentations and performances by Giannina Malaspina herself together with her grandson Francesco Di Carlo, including those held during the festival Valfino al Canto in Arsita and in theatres in Paris. At the origin of this renewed interest was the musical production of the group A’ssaltarella, of which Francesco Di Carlo was also a member, involving Giannina Malaspina and Marino Ciprietti in a short original recording and giving rise to an initial experiment in reinterpretation of their repertoire.
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