Fiamma Fumana Official WebSite

It’s nice to wander the Po valley plains and suddenly glimpse this kind of momument, reminding us who we are and where we come from. Thanks to Fabio Vetro for the pictures (there are more) and to Valeria for the post.

Davide Ferrario and Andrea Zambelli, producer and director of “Mondine - From mother to daughter” (the documentary about Mondine di Novi and Fiamma Fumana. I write about this here and here) have decided to move the film premiere from the spring to the Fall 2008. And for a very good reason: there is a lot of very high quality footage, they need extra time to edit it and make a wonderful film, that will make people laugh and cry. So we decided to reform and relaunch the project’s blog: also, we will do several things with the Novi choir from here to the Fall. We have a new domain (mondine.it) and a new group, with my old friend Valeria Carletti as the main blogger and a more recent friend, Freddy Mascheretti, to take care of the relevant technology. We have a guru too, Luca “Vanz” Vanzella of Daimon and Maestrini per caso: he has been so kind as to give us some good advice over dinner (Eritrean restaurant), but of course he bears no responsibility over our modest, utterly unprofessional blogging efforts. And good luck to us! You can find the new blog here./

Great party in Novi: a big meal to celebrate Christmas with mondine. We ate (excellently, as always when these ladies are involved), we sang a lot and we enjoyed sketches of folk theatre (in dialect) by the Gruppo Padano di Piadena, who by the way sing VERY well, they are a sort of male mondine. A nice discovery! Mondine also set up a Christmas-themed theatrical piece of their own titled “If the three Kings were women”: Agnes was particularly unforgettable as the Ox, with a sign saying “mad cow” hanging from her neck. Great stuff. Happy Christmas to all!

She’s not writing about it on the blog (being modest!), but this week Lady J goes back to school. She’s been offered a place as a Ph.D. student at University of Siena: she is going to study Hiistroy of the modernization, with a dissertation about… rice weeders! Which seems a really sensible choice, given the extra privileged access to sources we enjoy. I hope she will interview me too, since I feel like a honorary mondina myself ;’)
Meanwhile, I arrived in Sevilla to attend WOMEX. I’ll write about it in the next few days.

Shooting for the Mondine movie is officially finished: we have been editing since September. For now, Zambe the director has put together this showreel, which contains footage (and audio) from the Detroit show cut with clips shot in various other occasions (at Arezzo on May 1st, in Detroit, on the rice paddies) and vintage repertoire material. It was really emotional to watch it… I can’t wait for the film to be finished.