CHRONICLES FROM MAREMMA - First part - Communicating is living: Massimo Marracci of ANUU Migratoristi takes stock of hunting in Maremma.
For us hunters, uttering the word "Maremma" means evoking the very essence of hunting, so wonderfully captured and translated in their pages by some of the greatest Italian hunting narrators between the 800th and 900th centuries such as Eugenio Niccolini and Luigi Ugolini, to come to our contemporaries Bruno Modugno and Franco Nobile and keeping silent about many others, not to do them wrong but only for reasons of economies of space that we must respect.
Hunting in Maremma - whether it is Tuscany or Lazio - it doesn't matter - you can breathe it in every landscape, you can catch it in every glimpse, you can guess it in the rustic and typical places that dot the territory, you can sense it in talking about the local people . Stories of wild boars and marshes, of malaria and sharecropping, of ducks and geese, of thrushes and woodcocks, of hounds and heavy taxes, of hardship and deprivation, of incomparable environments and equally immense efforts and of the slow rebirth of recent times. Even here in Follonica, where we are in these days for a little holiday with the family, on the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea which almost always placidly crashes against the sands of this beautiful gulf, all this happens.
Obviously, in the midst of the seaside context it is not at all easy to find concrete hunting opportunities other than the sensations that personal sensitivity dictates, which is why, while waiting to make some excursions in the interior, we have proposed to investigate the pages of the newspapers to find something precise and detailed.
No sooner said than done: for three days in a row - three days at random, that is 3, 4 and 5 August - the most widely read newspaper in these parts, “Il Tirreno”, spoke in some way about hunting. Precisely, he did it this way: first, telling about the Mayor of Florence Matteo Renzi who, as a guest at Capalbio Libri 2012 to present "Stil Nuovo", his latest literary effort, took the favorable opportunity for a rich wild boar-based aperitif at the hunters' hut called La Casa dell'Aquila; then, dedicating a fair amount of space to the new provincial hunting fauna plan of Grosseto, unanimously approved by the Provincial Council and illustrated in its novelties and qualifying points by the President of the Administration Leonardo Marras; finally, hosting an advertising space at the bottom of the page, part of an excellent media campaign by Federcaccia Toscana entitled “The hunters…. serious people ”, which portrays a group of five people, from the surgeon to the clerk passing through a railway worker, a lawyer and a farmer, who look at the reader with serious kindness not without a polite smile.
Here is the "proven proof" (although there was no need for it) of how important our beloved hunt can still be in the Third Millennium. And Tuscany, although exemplary, is certainly not the only case: many other regions and provinces and small and medium-sized municipalities could and should be equal.
Let's wake up guys, otherwise, as popular wisdom says when coming to our aid, "there will be no more tripe for cats" ...
See you in the next episode, with the best wishes to all of a happy summer!
Massimo Marracci