Correspondence
Write to me
Variants of legends heard in the family, corrections, sources I have missed. The local variants are what interests me most: they are the only material that is in no book.
The address is fratercustos@proton.me. There is no form, and that is not an oversight: a form would collect data, and until I have a clean way of declaring who collects it I prefer a mailbox and nothing else. The Privacy page explains why.
What is genuinely useful to me
The variants you heard at home. The name your grandmother called it by, the village, the valley, the approximate year, who told you and on what occasion. Even a single line. An oral variant attested by a person with a name and a place is worth, for this atlas, as much as a footnote: it is the material that the nineteenth-century collections stopped collecting.
Corrections. A wrong date, a source cited badly, an attribution that does not hold. I correct in public and with the date, in the register of corrections, stating what it used to say. If the report is yours and you would like to be thanked, tell me and I thank you under whatever name you prefer; if you would rather not, nothing appears.
The sources I am missing. Local collections, university theses, parish bulletins, dialectology journals, parish archives. Above all for the entries the atlas marks grade C, where I am the first to know the documentation is weak.
What I do not do
I do not give consultations, I do not interpret dreams, I do not offer opinions on personal matters and I do not certify the authenticity of objects. It is not reticence: it is that this site reports what a community has believed, not what I claim to be true, and the distinction holds only if I am the first to keep it.
A note on language
Write in English or in Italian, whichever you prefer. If you are writing about an Italian local variant, the dialect form as you heard it is more useful than a translation of it — send it as it sounds, and tell me where.
The calendar of the nights
A monthly letter on the Italian popular feasts and rites of the coming month — verified dates, places where they are still held, and the atlas entry in progress — is the thing I would like to do, and I have not opened it yet. The reason is the one written above: a list of addresses needs a data controller with a real name, and I have not untied that knot. I would rather say so than put a form on the page that pretends to work.
When I open it I shall write it here and in the register of corrections. In the meantime, anyone who wants to be told can simply write to me: I keep it in mind without keeping a list.