During their research on oral epic between Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro, Milman Parry and Albert Lord set out to test their theories about a new era of Homeric scholarship, observing how some unlettered singers from the Balkans composed their poems: these singers of tales could perform several thousands of verses – in the XX century! – without the aid of writing.

One of them, Avdo Međedović, performed a version of the tale “the Wedding of Meho Smailagić”, which was more than twelve thousand lines long: it took him just a few days and “many cups of coffee”.

Many years later, in another dimension, at another level, I thought about that wedding, when, wandering through the almost deserted lands of the Campanian Appennino, I picked up off mud and dust a small photographic archive. I don’t know much about the subjects portrayed, nor about the photographer, but I am quite confident that the weddings in these pictures took place in the late Sixties. In his essay about the visual ethnography of Sicilian rural communities, Rosario Perricone focuses on the orality of images, pointing out how, ironically, in this age of Literacy, photography replaces words, or, at least, precedes them in preserving and passing down universal knowledge, independently of authorship. Following this trail, I went back to the places I could recognize in the pictures and I let the passage of time speak: those places were different and yet always the same, just like the songs of the bards.