We are a group of Italian associations and organizations gathering folk artists and promoting folk concerts. We are reaching out to you now to propose a new Folk Festival, which will focus on Italian popular music and dances from before World War II. The artists participating in our festival are both internationally renowned professionals and young musicians who are making a name for themselves on the music scene. 

If you are interested in this initiative of ours, we will be glad to send you both video and audio materials on it. While striving to be original, we look at such models as the Taranta Festival in Southern Italy and the Quarrata Folk Festival (near Pistoia). We greatly admire their artistic directors, that is, the famous musicians Claudio Carboni and Riccardo Tesi, respectively. Like the organizers of these two celebrated festivals, we too wish to help the audience rediscover their origins and the music of their ancestors. As such, our event will provide a full immersion in popular Italian culture, its dances, rhythms, dialects and melodies.

Also, our festival will join music with Italian cuisine, thus making it possible for participants to discover (or rediscover) old recipes, what you may call "Grandma's Recipes"! To this purpose, we will hold a cooking contest as part of the festival. To pull off this major event, we can rely on the collaboration of very experienced colleagues from our own province, that is, Pistoia. Among them are the members of the Luigi Tronci Foundation. As some of you may know, the Tronci family has been making musical instruments since the 18th century. In the following century, they produced church organs and collaborated with such musicans as Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, and Pietro Mascagni, making percussion instruments for their operas’ premieres. 

Today the Tronci family owns U.F.I.P., the famous brand of plates and percussion instruments. Suffice it to say that the Rolling Stones have been using U.F.I.P. cymbals for many years now, as the Beatles (that is, Ringo Starr) did before them. Thanks to such a strong network of collaborators in our own territory we look forward to establishing a series of partnerships with other cities, both in Italy and abroad. In the latter case, we are thinking of Italian communities living outside the peninsula and yet very much connected with their own culture and family origins.

If you wish to learn more about our festival and all related initiatives, starting with the program that we are now in the process of drafting (proposals are welcome, by the way!), please feel free to email me. I and the two festival directors (Claudio Carboni and Riccardo Tesi) will answer you as soon as possible.

P.S. if you have Facebook and you want to see our pages you can see at Fondazione Luigi Tronci, Quarrata Folk Festival, Associazione Culturidea provincia Pistoia