Chiara Vigo: Bisso e il Giuramento del Mare - Byssus and the Sea Oath
Pinna Nobilis, foto di Kosta Ladas
INDEX
Images
Giuramento del Mare - Byssus and the Sea Oath
Official website Chiara Vigo
Video
Info sul Bisso - Info about Byssus
Il Bisso e la 'Sacerdotessa del mare' Chiara Vigo
Chiara Vigo: The last woman who
makes sea silk
Bisso di mare, foto di Luigi Garavaglia
Leone delle donne
Foto di Luca Bonaccorsi
Foto di Roberto Rossi
Luce di Bisso
Ponente, Levante, Maestro e Grecale
Prendete La mia anima e
Buttatela nel fondale
Che sia la Mia Vita
Per Essere, Pregare e Tessere
Per Ogni Gente
Che da me và e da me viene
Senza Tempo.Senza nome, Senza Colore, Senza Confini,
Senza denaro
In nome del Leone dell'Anima Mia e
Dello Spirito Eterno
Così Sarà.
West, East, Master and Grecale
Take my soul and
Throw in the seabed
So be My Life
To Be, To pray and Weave
For Every People
That to me goes and to me comes
Timeless, Nameless, Colorless, Borderless,
Moneyless
In the name of Lion and of My Soul and
Of The Eternal Spirit
It will be so
Video
Italiano
English
Bisso - Byssus
Italiano
English
Chiara Vigo: The last woman who makes sea silk
(Max Paradiso www.bbc.com)
Silk is usually made
from the cocoons spun by silkworms - but there is another, much rarer, cloth
known as sea silk or byssus, which comes from a clam. Chiara Vigo is thought to
be the only person left who can harvest it, spin it and make it shine like
gold.
Villagers
stare as I knock on the door of Chiara Vigo's studio, otherwise known as the
Museum of Byssus, on the Sardinian island of Sant'Antioco. One sign on the door
says: "Haste doesn't live here." Another adds: "In this room
nothing is for sale." Vigo is sitting in a far corner of the room
surrounded by yarns and canvasses, holding hands with a young woman whose eyes
are full of tears. She caresses her and braids a bracelet while staring
intensely at the girl. Then she hums a song with her eyes closed and fixes the
bracelet on the girl's wrist. She reaches for the window and opens the shades
to let the sunlight in and instantly the dark brown bracelet starts to gleam. The
girl is flabbergasted but this is no magic.
The
bracelet is made of an ancient thread, known as byssus, which is mentioned on
the Rosetta stone and said to have been found in the tombs of pharaohs. Some believe
it was the cloth God told Moses to lay on the first altar. It was the finest
fabric known to ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, and one of its remarkable
properties is the way it shines when exposed to the sun, once it has been
treated with lemon juice and spices. Another is that it is extraordinarily
light. Chiara Vigo asked me to close my eyes and extend my hand. I knew what
she was going to do, but still I could not tell when a small square of the
cloth touched my skin. The raw material
comes from the glistening aquamarine waters that surround the island. Every
spring Vigo goes diving to cut the solidified saliva of a large clam, known in
Latin as Pinna Nobilis.
She does
it early in the morning, to avoid attracting too much attention, and is
accompanied by members of the Italian coastguard - this is a protected species.
It takes 300 or 400 dives to gather 200g of material.
Then she
starts weaving it, but as the sign on the door says, it is not for sale. "It
would be like commercialising the flight of an eagle" Vigo says. "The
byssus is the soul of the sea. It is sacred."
She
gives the fabric to people who come to her for help. It may be a couple who
have decided to marry or who have married, a woman who wants a child, or one
who has recently become pregnant. Byssus is believed to bring good fortune and
fertility. "Before it was emperors [who wore byssus], now it is young
women and newlywed couples," Vigo says. "I weave for outcasts, the
poor, people in need."
A steady
stream of them, mostly Italian, arrive throughout the day. If they bring a
child's christening dress, she will embroider it. Vigo's father died when she was eight and her
mother was an obstetrician who mostly worked away from home, so much of the
time she was looked after by her grandmother - and it was her grandmother who
taught her the art of working and embroidering with byssus. She in turn had
learned it from her own mother, and so on, back through the generations.
"Weaving the sea silk is what my family has been doing for
centuries," Vigo says. "The most important thread, for my family, was
the thread of their history, their tradition." They have never made a
penny from it, she points out. She herself married a coal miner, and they live
on his pension and the occasional donation. According to Vigo, the skill was
brought to Sant'Antioco by Princess Berenice, great-granddaughter of the
Biblical Herod, Herod the Great, during the second half of the First Century.
Her family remains Jewish, unlike many others in southern Italy and Sardinia
who converted to Christianity long ago, but continued to set a table for the
Sabbath on Friday evenings well into the 20th Century, without knowing why. According
to Gabriel Hagai, professor of Hebrew Codicology at the Ecole Pratique des
Haute Etudes in Paris, Vigo is "the last remnant" of a combination of
Jewish and Phoenician religious practices that was once far more widespread in
the Mediterranean. "I met Chiara through a fellow professor in Paris, and
I was sceptical at first," he says. "This craft combined folklore and
religion [but] she has allowed us to reconstruct a forgotten and missing part of
our history." Up until the Mussolini era there were still a number of
women in Italy who were skilled with byssus, says Evangelina Campi, a professor
of Italian history and author of La Seta del Mare (The Silk of the Sea). Some
even tried to set up a business and make money from it. "The factory ran
out of business in three months," Campi says. "This is a thing you
cannot profit on. Strangely, something bad has happened to people who wanted to
manufacture byssus on a large scale in the past. It's like God sending a
message."
Even
now, there are still a few elderly women in Apulia (the heel of Italy) who can
weave it, Campi says, but none who can make it shine, or dye it with
traditional colours, in the way that Vigo can. And Vigo is the only person in
Italy who still harvests it. In the evening, Vigo spends a couple of hours
teaching people how to weave with byssus. After that, at sunset, I go with her
to a deserted cove where she prays twice a day.
"You
have to be respectful to the place you live in. You are just passing by, these
places are here to stay. And the sea has its own soul and you have to ask for
permission to get a piece of it," she says.
Her
chant, which mixes ancient Sardinian dialect and Hebrew, echoes off the rocks. "I
pray for what has been and what will be," she says. One thing that will be
is that Vigo's daughter - currently a student in northern Italy - will one day
tread in her mother's footsteps. "My daughter, although I will leave very
little to her, will have to continue this tradition," she says, "so
humankind can benefit from it."
...continua...
...continua...
