Confine, soglia, interfaccia: poesia e oralità in Alta Val di Vizze

This article is devoted to the dialectal and ethnolinguistic traditions of the Pfitsch Valley, particularly of the High Pfitsch Valley, a border area between Italy and Austria near Sterzing/Vipiteno and the Brenner Pass. Scarcely connected to its valley floor for centuries and better connected instead to the Pusteria Valley and the Valleys of Inn via the Pfitsch Pass, this high mountain area has preserved such ancient and peculiar facts of language and culture that it could be called a Museum of Linguistic Antiquities. After describing the geomorphology of the valley and briefly outlining its socio-linguistic and political-cultural long history, the dialect of the High Pfitsch Valley and its morpho-phonological peculiarities are here framed in the current, arduous coexistence in South-Tyrol between the dialectal varieties of South-Bavarian origin, standard German and Italian. Then, in order to better present its lexical oral characteristics and their graphematic rendering, different textual versions of nine poems by a contemporary poetess from Kematen/Caminata are finally presented and briefly commented on.