Novi Pop: Piccole Leggende di Montemitro

Tre piccole storie vegetali is an exercise whose goal is to tell the story of a plant in an editorial artifact, interpreting personal stories, historical and anthropological research regarding the use of a plant or iconographic research of the representation of a plant.

In this editorial project I represented a simple country story reworking it from my point of view. This small story is founded on a misunderstanding due to the peculiar language of the town of Montemitro, Na Našo, an ancient Serbo-Croatian dialect that survived the centuries only in three towns in Molise. In the first half the Na Našo is faithfully transcribed, so much so that it appears a raw and hostile language. In the second half, however, it is translated, revealing the misunderstanding. In this way, the banal story handed down orally gains meaning and becomes a photograph that immortalize a seemingly anonymous, but actually interesting place, in an indefinite instant of the first half of the twentieth century. The oral history, subject to continuous reworking and changes of passage from person to person, reveals what was before it and opens the doors to new narrators, who perhaps insert personal details into the story, making it unique, making it their own.