A book that is unusual in many ways has just been published, and is for sale in the main bookshops: Luciano Gibelli’s Prima che scenda il buio–Dnans ch’a fàssa neuit (Before Darkness Falls). It’s unusual because it’s bilingual, and printed in parallel text, Italian and Piedmontese; because, in spite of its elegant editorial format, the author published it at his own expense; and above all because it has an unusual subject, which is expressed precisely in the subtitle, “Tools, objects, and things of the past collected so that they will not be forgotten.”
The book therefore fits into the theoretical frame of Material Culture, a link between anthropology and history, but it makes no claim to any doctrine, to any abstraction, or to any school.
The author, the fifty-five-year-old Luciano Gibelli, from Canelli, is a gentle enthusiast without academic qualifications. He is an inquiring and rigorous amateur, driven by the desire to ensure the survival, at least in memory, of a civilization that is about to die: the civilization contained in objects that only the oldest among us have had occasion to see, or have heard described by their fathers and grandfathers. Gibelli, resorting mainly to friendly interviews with the old people of towns and villages, rather than to library research, gives us a philologically complete portrait of each object, including its various names, its origin, and its use, along with drawings that he made himself, done carefully to scale, in millimeters.
Many of these objects he found in Gozzano’s beloved country attics, “where age-old refuse sleeps”;1 others, which could no longer be found but which someone remembered, he reconstructed himself, out of old wood and metal, to see them, feel them in his hands, and try them out. It was an almost religious work, a work of devout patience and refined manual skill; but in it one recognizes also the pious effort of the painter who paints a portrait from memory of a beloved person who has died.
Yet this rigor is coupled with an amusing freedom in the design of the book. It would be more correct to say that the book does not have a design: one subject arises from another, discursively, as when friends are gathered around a fireside. From the House we move on to Bricks, to Tiles, and by analogy to Braziers, Fire, and various ancient (but not too ancient!) methods of lighting fires. From Weights and Measures we move to certain remote bureaucratic customs, to equipment for writing, inks, seals, and so on. The author has no fear of digression; in fact he finds these his truest inspiration, in the affectionate descriptions of family rituals, holidays, obsolete traditions. See, for example, the pages where, from a technological description of bells, he goes on to speak, with anxious nostalgia, of the various ways they were rung, the Gaudietta, the Concent, the Melodia: extinguished voices, artificially revived.
Who today would know how to prepare a quill pen? One drawing illustrates the seven steps, and another demonstrates the Sharpener, a multipurpose tool that was used uniquely to cut the quills and sharpen them; we also learn that, because of their different curvature, the most valuable feathers were those taken from the left wing. Feathers from the right wing hampered writing, because their end came too close to the writer’s eyes. Immediately afterward are listed no fewer than ten indispensable accessories for the scribe, from the portable inkwell to the “dustbox,” the precursor of blotting paper; it, too, was rendered superfluous by the invasion of the ballpoint pen.
Browsing the six hundred entries in the book, we learn that in a not so distant time copper eyeglasses were used in cases of emergency. These were domes of copper with a tiny hole, which, reducing the light to the pupil, reduced in equal measure all the defects of vision: if the illumination was good, it allowed one at least to thread a needle. We can also find equipment and rules for games that have disappeared, like spinning a top, tipcat (cirimela), and peashooting.
We learn that the blacksmith had available at least three types of nails for horseshoes: normal nails, nails for climbing, and nails for ice. Often before setting off on a long uphill, the carter himself had to replace one with the other, as we do now with snow chains. We read with nostalgia and curiosity hundreds of recipes for simple dishes, and of these no fewer than a dozen have to do with wafers (Canëstrej), in which the fundamental ingredient to be added to the flour ranges from chocolate to garlic; also described and illustrated is the wafer iron, an essential piece of equipment for making them.
Recipes, kitchen equipment, and edible plants occupy a hundred pages, and more than a hundred are described: it’s interesting to see among them many “weeds,” like plantains, and one thinks back to the skinny girl Manzoni mentions, who steals from the cows wild grasses, “on which hunger had taught her that men, too, could live.” That was a time of famine, but there was almost always famine. A portrait of a time when the kitchen was the heart of the house and meals were a ritual emerges from these passages more vividly than from a direct description: a time when the rhythm of life was poorer than ours, more precarious, but also more convivial and more human.
It’s fortunate that before the darkness of oblivion (of dësmèntia) descends, the shapes of oil lamps have been recorded, along with the belts for threshing, sundials, wine kegs, and hundreds of other objects molded by the experience of many centuries, which now have disappeared or are disappearing. Our hands reside not only in the illustrious works of individual creativity but also in these humble tools that were the companions of our forefathers on the road of life.
La Stampa, March 22, 1981
1. From “La signorina Felicita ovvero la felicità,” a poem by Guido Gozzano (1883–1916).