Fame di cibo e di divinità. La Badia di Sampeyre: un patrimonio di intangibile ritualità

[Machine translation] Every five years in Sampeyre, in the Cuneo mountains, the community celebrates the rite of the Abbey, a virile folk institute that organizes Carnival, a rite of beginning the year that is always renewed without interruption, even when the mountains have been depopulated due to an epochal emigration. The five-year scan of the abbey recalls the need for social and cultural re-construction of the community that has undergone the diaspora of abandonment, repeating in the wake of its ancestors the gestures and words of the theater of life., The hunger for divinity and food that has marked traditional mountain life over the seasons and times, in search of the gods who govern the awakening of nature to overcome the need for nourishment with ritual magism, is still represented today in a complex, symbolic carnival apparatus that refers to a need for community sacredness. In the memory represented by the divine and the sharing of food, the abbey finds the substantial reasons to re-update the rite in function of a community that, in tradition, finds new trajectories for the future. A masked forest of symbols that refers to even pre-Christian myths that have presided and still preside over the life of these mountains. A story of gestures and words that is part of the rebirth and rediscovery of food, tradition and the deities they still hold, alludes to nature., Starting from these considerations, visual anthropology research was conducted that documented the carnival rite of 2017. Ten camera units have, at the same time, filmed, memorized and critically analyzed the space-time unfolding of the ritual action. In addition to the scientific reasons that led the research group to investigate Sampeyre's ritual terrain, the original film material makes it possible to document and interpret one of the most important carnivals in the Alpine tradition, an identity festival in which the Occitan people are recognized, with a view to starting its recognition by UNESCO as an intangible heritage of humanity.