ITALIAN NETWORK OF POPULAR CULTURE
The Italian Network of Popular Culture aims to innovate, study, protect and set out popular culture and intangible goods.
On 25th January 2007 was signed an “ Agreement for the performance activities” among the Minister for Arts and Culture, the Regions, the Independent Provinces, the Provinces and the Towns. The Agreement’s objectives are: “... the development of identity and territorial vocations, through economic and organizational supports characterized by a close contact with the territory; the diversification of the cultural offer, the development of projects in network, in extra municipal, extra provincial and inter regional territorial contexts; the promotion of projects for increasing the audience and the spread of the show among young people; the use of tools allowing a rationalization of the available state and territorial resources...”.
Since some years, there is an active network of municipalities, provinces, regions and associations pursuing the above mentioned objectives, which work specifically to recover and promote culture and folk traditions.
The network includes a large national territory, which allows a great circulation of ideas and projects.
The network acts through a legal body formed in 2004, called Committee Festival of Provinces, consisting of sixteen provinces distributed on the national territory, the Slow Good Association and the Theater of Forms Association.
Since 2007 the Committee Festival of Provinces has been recognized as “ Italian Network of Popular Culture” by the Minister for Arts and Culture.
The Committee Festival of Provinces ( Italian Network of Popular Culture) had a lot of different experiences with popular culture. Besides the studies and the researches carried out by a Scientific Committee, created within the juridical body, composed of anthropologists and scholars of Italian folk tradition, the Committee has developed some projects aimed at the discovery, protection, promotion and contextualization of traditions and various expressions of popular culture, existing in the Italian provinces: from spectacular forms ( music, theater, orality) to traditional forms ( feasts, local customs, rituals); from territorial material culture to language minorities.
These “ forms” of popular culture must be protected and promoted as genuine aids of Culture and Popular Customs. That is why some specific projects have been developed, through a wide network systems composed of bodies, territorial and cultural resources:
- Festival of Provinces, Itinerant Festival of Popular Culture
- International Festival of Popular Orality
- International Award of Witnesses of Popular Culture
- Itinerant Chairs of Popular Culture
- 13th December – National Day of Italian Network of Popular Culture
- Mediterranean Network of Popular Orality