For Luigi De Angelis, wood carving is a daily activity pursued alongside shepherding, with a steady commitment that over the decades has filled both the house-museum at Case Venane and his home in San Giorgio with hundreds of handmade objects. Walking sticks constitute his most recognisable production: he carves various kinds, for walking or for work, selecting branches of crognale (cornelian cherry), manna ash and olive for the shaft, but also oak, blackthorn and beech, and shaping the handle with great skill to create zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures: snouts of dogs, donkeys and horses, goats and cows, pigs and hens, birds of prey, reptiles, bearded faces and heads of saints, which gradually emerge from the natural outlines of the wood. Alongside the sticks, Luigi produces small sculptures and minor objects, such as niches for carved statuettes, beech keyrings depicting faces, spoons and ladles for cooking polenta or curd-breakers used in cheesemaking, but also larger objects created or decorated from recovered and pre-existing tools, such as oak balancing poles formerly used in rural contexts for hanging and processing pork, decorated with serpent motifs, crosses and stylised flames. His textile and paper production — crocheted lace pieces, knitted wool garments, hats woven from recycled telephone directories and peanut packets, bottles decorated with crochet made from plastic bags — complements the wooden work in a repertoire that turns his home into a small popular Wunderkammer.

The method is rigorously manual: no electrical tools are used, only a pocketknife, a billhook for splitting, a hatchet for rough shaping, chisels and rasps, and occasionally small gouges. Luigi works seated, outdoors whenever the weather permits; he holds the piece in his hands or rests it on one knee and proceeds through small, precise movements. The most characteristic feature accompanying his carving practice — also highlighted by the anthropologist Emanuele Di Paolo — is singing, together with the visualisation of the form enclosed within the wood: his hands seem almost to move on their own, sustained by a voice intoning songs or pilgrim litanies, giving rhythm to the blows of the hatchet. One further ceremonial expression of this skill is the making of anti-hail crosses, which Luigi continues to produce every year in preparation for the feast of the Holy Cross on 3 May, according to a procedure learned from his father and grandfather, of which he remains one of the last active custodians.

Carving also constitutes Luigi’s principal means of presenting himself to audiences beyond the village. As carefully analysed by Di Paolo, his sticks — often decorated with inscriptions, religious and secular emblems, and imaginative compositions featuring saints, animals and scenes of pastoral life — are exhibited at the Artistic Crafts Exhibition of Guardiagrele and taken to the Shepherding Fair of Piano Roseto, where they are photographed, admired and partly sold. Taken as a whole, his art therefore combines a utilitarian dimension — according to which every stick is functional and every cross fulfils a ritual task — with a decorative and performative component that makes Luigi De Angelis recognised at the regional level as one of the few remaining representatives of a form of pastoral craftsmanship that has elsewhere disappeared entirely.