First part: monuments in extinction
Leonardo da Vinci said that wisdom is the daughter of experience. When it comes to hunting, not everyone has the grace of being able to experience it and, in fact, there is not much knowledge about hunting. Gone are the times when this art, unanimously recognized as noble, deserved manuals that not only indicated how to practice it but that encouraged its approach. And fewer and fewer old hunters remain to whom you can say "tell me how it was", whose speech almost always begins with "eh ... it wasn't as easy as now". Note it: you don't know how to react to that “easy as now”: it's true the means were more spartan, improvised, often rough; but being told that hunting is easy today, for those who know it, has the same effect as the noise of the side of a luxury car scratching against a wall. It seems this, especially to an inexperienced eye and ear: that hunting is easy.
That everything is identified in the final act, that of the shot, and that it itself is something banal, infallible, within everyone's reach. That being there, at that precise moment, in that situation can be considered as paying a ride, inserting the token, getting on a carousel and being sure that it will swoop down to make you feel the thrill you are looking for. No one knows how difficult it is to get to feel that thrill in the hunt. How much experience, effort, disappointments, expectations, that thrill cost. And then, if we do not find contemporary handbooks that show us how to go hunting, it is still right every now and then to retrace what has been for each of us, over the years, the experience of hunting, and how it has been there. transmitted by those who have acquired wisdom on earth, in the air and in the water.
Almost as old as man. “Almost” because it was born soon after, when defending oneself from ferocious beasts gave way to becoming a hunter, since plant nourishment was not enough. They were gatherers-hunters, they were for two and a half million years, and there were no vegetarians among them, much less vegans: it didn't take long to understand even then that animal proteins were preferable to vegetable ones ... evolution on this subject, it seems, must have happened backwards for a rowdy slice of nihilists who would like to convince us that living without meat would be better! To go back to our history: the tricks and the means no longer had the sole purpose of keeping animals away, but of winning them not by running away anymore but by hunting, in fact. It would be a very long, albeit very interesting undertaking, to retrace all the methods that the hunter learned to make use of, but it is right to approach our times, to things that we still have the good fortune to be able to admire: forgotten pieces of history, not only by the laymen, but also by many who show themselves to be great connoisseurs of hunting.
We are talking about "Roccoli" or "brescianelle"(Depending on the area and small technical differences). These are the most complex birding structures (a word that at the time did not know the current negative meaning) that man was able to develop thanks to the study of the migration of birds, their path through the mountains and the most suitable places to install such structures. , although it is not yet clear why, given the same characteristics, certain crossings and watersheds were preferred over others.
Il roccolo it consisted of one or more rounds of plants (such as the hornbeam, perfect because in the lower part it forms a kind of colonnade, while in the upper it expands into very dense branches); at the center of the highest of these stood a turret, called a casotto, about ten meters high, also completely camouflaged by plants and vegetation. On the ground floor of the turret the calls were placed in a large room, while in the upper one was the closet from which the fowler spied the approach of the birds. During the capture they were well hidden, and inserted in the most strategic points of the rounds or among the fruit trees that filled the spaces between them, the calls. While inside the rows of hornbeams, always double, the nets were fixed (which in the rocks do not exceed four meters, in the Brescianelle three).
The method with which the birds were caught was very simple: they entered the circle where the rock was attracted by the calls and as soon as they were about to perch on the plants inside, the fowler went out on the balcony whistling with the so-called mute and throwing the scarecrow, a shape wicker (formerly also of cardboard or rags) that simulated the swooping hawk. At that point the birds, fleeing low to seek shelter among the plants, "buried themselves" in the nets.
La brescianella it does not differ much in structure, but the moment of capture changes, as thanks to the grains scattered on the ground and the use of laughings and games, the birds to be captured were expected to settle inside the round, and only at that point , with a very rapid movement, the fowler activated a more complex bogey than the "hawk" of the roccolo: a rope raised an iron wire that crossed the whole Brescianella and to which rags, brooms and sometimes even cowbells were attached from cows. The difficulty lay precisely in not showing the movement of the wire before that of the attached contraptions! We got up at four in the morning at the beginning of the season, and at three in October, when the cold drove the thrushes (the first to pass) down very early or, even, on full moon nights, making them pass all night. .
Qualche roccolo today it survives only for catches, regularly controlled, for the purpose of recall, and thanks to the commitment of a few. After all, the first thing you learn when you attend the course to obtain the hunting license, is that "fowling is the most serious crime" and that when this occurs, the term hunter must be replaced with poacher. Perhaps, in the shadow of this pretext, and also thanks to the possibility of making use of comfortable, accessible and affordable means, it is okay for us not to know, to continue to confuse the two things, forgetting how dense the experience has been over the centuries. hunting, how many eyes have been raised towards the sky, how much ground has been consumed and destroyed under the soles of shoes, how many times it has been blown into both hands to warm them, how many dawns have arisen behind increasingly curved backs that rise a mountain . How much all this deserves to be known and told. If certainly you can't go back, when the value of everything that revolved around hunting was different, different to the point that even, in the Vicenza area, many roccoli before the opening were blessed in procession by the parish priest, if certainly it will be difficult to return to hunting with the dignity of when things "weren't as easy as now", it is also certain, however, that that moment, that of the shot, is not a moment: it has been centuries. It is not, at all, buying a token.
di Eleonora Vignato e Mauro Riga - Picture of Gianpietro Corti
long live the fowling, long live the roccoli and traditions.