The poem below ( and continues in other page, given its length) is a testimony of the ancient craft of charcoal at one time and for many centuries, widespread among the people Pistoia Apennines. These men, but often women and children, eleven months a year living in rustic huts set up in the middle of the woods. Their bed was made of wood covered with ferns and leaves. Their daily food consisted of maize polenta, accompanied by an anchovy or a herring, sometimes a piece of cheese, bread and wine appeared only during religious holidays. With a skill that bordered on art, they fitted out the "charcoal", addressed to transform wood of beech, holm oak and other woods in good coal, which has long constituted one of the most important sources of energy available. It was exhausting work, which profited mainly the rich who bought the woods and then entrusted them with charcoal, which, at the end of the season, remained only a few dollars in his pocket. During the summer months, the work was carried out in the mountains of Pistoia, but in winter they were forced to seek the warmer climate zones, and then migrated in Maremma (the famous folk song that curses, originates from these migrants) but also in Corsica and France. Assigned one of the teams of the different lots of forest, was almost always part of a boy of ten to twelve years, which touched the tasks "lighter", and that wherever it was called "Meo". The curious origin of the name, which, moreover, traces remain in many place names, and you want derived from St. Bartholomew, patron of children. In Pistoia archaic, "sanbartolomei" were defined as naughty children, naughty and very lively.
With the advent of coal, and the mass distribution of electricity, came to an end, immediately after the war, the epic story of coal miners. But in the mountains of Pistoia, it is still possible to see some old man who, driven by nostalgia and passion, sets up a small charcoal for household use.
The Song of the Meo is composed of eleven-syllable verses of eight each, scored AB AB AB CC, the first verse of the next stanza rhymes with the last line of the verse above. And 'This is the typical structure of songs "in the eighth rhyme" who were suddenly in the evening "to watch" by popular poets, often illiterate. Challenges that arose, in which the poets alternated, declaiming a verse each, and using the ending of the last verse to try to undermine the opponent.
The song is from the beautiful and poetic book Aimo Mucci "convicts of the Forest" (The Ori, Pistoia, 2006. ISBN 88 7336 220 6)
Song Meo
If Apollo wants to make me a favor
to put something in my head
There when I tell the servant
In a charcoal into the forest
call of my name should not
bensin Meo But the tradition attests
Sure was some cat Montanino.
I was ten years old when fate
I was without father and without a dowry
I was always more of the children hail
sick mother and work can possibly
I saw the days closer
It shakes me more misery
Life gave me the structure
of advice Pinocchio figure.
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