Il Pianto delle Zitelle

Lazio · Appennino centro-meridionale
Sanctuary of the Santissima Trinità at Vallepietra (province of Rome), on Monte Autore, on the border between Lazio and Abruzzo; the singers are from Vallepietra, the pilgrim companies come from Ciociaria and Abruzzo

Il Pianto delle Zitelle — at dawn on the Sunday after Pentecost, on the terrace below the Tagliata cliff, unmarried young women in white — one alone in dark dress, the Madonna — sing short solo arias on the Passion, alternating with fragments of a vernacular Miserere performed by a trio.

Variants and dialect names

Il Pianto delle Zitelle, the weeping of the unmarried girls; the solo arias are i Misteri; the singers are called zitelle

What is told

At dawn on the Sunday after Pentecost, on the terrace below the Tagliata cliff, unmarried young women in white — one alone in dark dress, the Madonna — sing short solo arias on the Passion, alternating with fragments of a vernacular Miserere performed by a trio. What defines it is not the lament: it is the alternation between solo aria and vernacular Miserere, entrusted to singers chosen by marital status and by voice, at dawn and in the open, closing the pilgrimage.

What it was forthe author’s reading

To close the pilgrimage with a song the village owns and that outsiders come to hear. Around the song stands a set of gestures: the carrying of boughs, the throwing of stones from the bridges, the comparatico with hands joined in the water, and walking backwards at the start of the path.

Where it is attested

The documentary chain is long and can be walked end to end: a manuscript booklet of 1836 with the Misteri and the vernacular Miserere, declared a copy of an original transcribed by Francesco Tozzi around 1700; Luigi Colacicchi, «Il Pianto delle Zitelle», Lares VII, 2, 1936; and the film Il pianto delle zitelle by Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini, 1939, 19 minutes, screenplay by Emilio Cecchi, photography by Angelo Jannarelli, produced by Lumen Veritas (Cineteca di Bologna record). ICPI record (Ministry of Culture), 26 May 2020, text by E. De Simoni; brochure of the Museo della Civiltà Contadina della Valle dell'Aniene, Roviano, 2016.

Caution

The 1836 manuscript and the Tozzi transcription are known to me from the Roviano museum brochure, which gives neither shelfmark nor place of deposit: they must be seen. The title of the volume edited by Simeoni appears as 1881-2006 in one source and 1821-2006 in another, and the discrepancy is unresolved. The film's musician is «Luigi Colacchi» in the Cineteca credits and «Luigi Colacicchi» in the brochure: probably a misprint, not verified. To be discarded: the lauda «of the twelfth century» (no thirteenth-century witness is ever indicated), the pre-Christian origin on Monte Autore, the ritual requirement of virginity for the singers — the sources I have read speak of selection by voice, availability and family — and the film «banned by the Fascist regime», which confuses a reworked version with a prize at Venice in 1939.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.