'Oltre l'Australia c'è la luna': Maggio garfagnino and the Emigrant Experience

Abstract

When I first visited the Garfagnana region of north-western Tuscany in 1991, I was assured by functionaries from the provincial government that the Maggio tradition of sung popular theatre would be finished within five years. The singers were too old, the tourists weren’t interested, there were no young people to carry it on. Yet over the next five years of my increasing involvement in the tradition, I saw a growth in the numbers of performances, active performers and companies, and audience numbers. This chapter advances some thoughts as to why Maggio continued so strongly against the odds in its home region of the Garfagnana, while attempts to mount performances in Australia have (to my knowledge) so far failed, despite the considerable numbers of Garfagnini who emigrated there. I will argue that the strength of the nexus between paese (home town) and performance practice in the Garfagnino Maggio stems from the Garfagnana’s long history of emigration, and that indeed various features of the Maggio genre appear to result from, or at least be intensified by, a “diaspora effect”, that is, the effect of expatriates on their community of origin. I argue that to understand the themes, form, performance practice and survival of this most localised of traditions we need to take into account the transnationalism of many Garfagnini and the role of campanilismo (loyalty to one’s home village) in sustaining emigrants abroad.