The restart of the territories: Saturday, May 15 “debuts” Barolo Italian City of Wine 2021

A signal of the restart of the wine territories, from the “capital” of one of the most important, such as the Langhe: Saturday, May 15 will be the scene of the ribbon cutting for Barolo Italian City of Wine 2021 www.barolo-piemonte2021.it, at 10.30 am “in the Temple of the WiMu of Barolo”. Which will officially kick off “Barolo 2021. Racconto infinito”, the fil rouge that has guided the candidacy of the first “Italian City of Wine”, the recognition conceived and promoted by the National Association of Wine Cities (of which Barolo is a founding member) and sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture.
During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, one of the first planned initiatives will be inaugurated at Wimu, the temporary exhibition “Vigna magica a Barolo” (Magic Vineyard in Barolo) housed in the Hall of Coats of Arms of the Falletti Castle, along the route of the Wine Museum which reopened its doors after the long closure due to pandemic and can be visited, for the moment, every weekend. The room will host, for the whole of 2021, two precious testimonies of the peasant civilization, the result of a collaboration with the Municipality of Vesime: a couple of anthropomorphic stelae in sandstone, one male and the other female, what remains of ancient head poles of the rows of a vineyard. The artifacts, suggestive and mysterious, have been carefully studied over the last forty years by Professor Piercarlo Grimaldi, former Rector of the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo. According to the well-known anthropologist, the stone headstocks are examples of folklore and peasant magic, that baggage of ancestral beliefs and rituals on which the agricultural community of the Langhe was founded for centuries.
The vineyard of Vesime, where the stones were found, was bordered by at least twenty pairs of similar artifacts, with an evident protective function against hail and vine diseases. The pair on display in Barolo is the only one to have survived, after the vineyard was rebuilt and the stone posts were replaced with wooden ones. And the “male” is the only original left, after the “female” was also lost: it was thanks to the photographs taken by Grimaldi in 1980, that a local picaper, Nando Gallo, was able to make a copy, thus bringing the stone-woman back to life.
The one in Barolo is the first museum exhibition of the last remaining original, outside the municipality of Vesime, which has kindly lent both the “male” and the “female” to the WiMu, on the occasion of the celebrations of Barolo Città Italiana del Vino 2021. The interest in these finds, however, is not limited to the museum or academic environment. Also in the Langhe, in the Fontanafredda estate, it is now possible to admire some reproductions of anthropomorphic stelae, still made by Gallo, which have returned to their natural environment, that is, a vineyard. The result is a “magic triangle”, a real itinerary on the traces of what remains of an ancient culture that never ceases to question us on the deeper meaning of our relationship with the earth and its symbolic and vital presences.
The protagonist of the ribbon-cutting ceremony of Barolo Città Italiana del Vino 2021 will also be the local community, which in 2020 celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the acquisition of the Falletti castle by the municipal administration (an undertaking to which many Barolo families also contributed). “This recognition - added the Mayor - should be shared above all with the Barolesi. And that is why the residents, not being able to have them in attendance at the inauguration for the strict anti-counting measures, will be invited to participate in a preview reserved for them, when Thursday 13 and Friday, May 14 will be involved in a series of tours of the castle, to which they already normally have free access according to the agreement made at the opening of the Museum of Wine in 2010, to see the new display in the Hall of Coats of Arms”.