It is a story that has been going on for 23 years , stronger than the landslides that have tormented this Ligurian Apennines village at an hour’s drive from Genoa. It was 1994, and at Christmas Mass in the church of Pentema, in the Municipality of Torriglia, people were counting on the fingers of one hand. “If this was going on, Pentema would die”, says Angelo Carpignano, a Genoese who spent most of the year in a village of a few houses next to the town. “Something had to be invented”. At the suggestion of the then parish priest of the village, Don Pietro, the following Christmas was born a crib that brought Pentema back at the end of the nineteenth century, with the crafts of the time recreated among its streets, in the houses, in the rooms of the ancient stone houses .
MASSIMILIANO SALVO
MASSIMILIANO SALVO
Since then, every autumn, the volunteers of the “Amici di Pentema” club, of which Carpignano is president, place dozens of life-sized statues in the village: mannequins dressed with the garments found in the older wardrobes and the faces modeled by Pongo, to have the appearance of really existent pentemins.
MASSIMILIANO SALVO
The 2017 edition of the nativity scene was inaugurated, as usual, on December 8 with the music of bagpipes and accordions, accompanied by Christmas carols and folk dances. The appointments will continue until mid-January, with guided tours, concerts and readings. The crib can be visited every weekend until Saturday 23 December 2017; every day from Sunday 24 December to Saturday 6 January; finally, the weekend of 13 and 14 January 2018. The opening hours are from 10 to 18.
MASSIMILIANO SALVO
MASSIMILIANO SALVO
This year the crib is included in the project # Pentema2018 , made by three young Genoese – Matteo Nebiacolombo, Gabriele Gussoni and Enrico Chinchella – who in a year of study have deepened the traditions of the Ligurian hinterland: the initiative led to the creation of a photographic exhibition that tells the Ligurian hinterland between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The project # Pentema2018 has then allowed to deepen with research in the archives, oral sources, research in the cartography and in the territory what is left of the peasant culture, making a parallel between the representations of the crib – museum and how it is possible today to trace in the woods Liguria.
And the # Pentema2018 project is yet another demonstration of the power of the Pentema crib: keeping the country alive even in the months away from Christmas. “When no one would come,” says Stefano Fossa, the much younger pentemino with his 52 years. In 2015 Stefano left his home in the suburbs of Genoa to take over the management of the Locanda al Pettirosso, the only one in the village. Since then he has taken cows, goats and hens. During the week he grazes animals, collects wood, sells eggs. At the weekend it turns into a restaurateur. “Thanks to the crib at Pentema, there are people in October and November, because the nativity scene must be set up, even in February and March, when the mannequins must be returned to the warehouses”.
