The project ‘Fanghetto Stories’ was initiated by Carla Delfos, Doerte Ulka Engelkes and Franca Pignone in 2017.
They felt the need to document the traditional life of Fanghetto for the inhabitants (for all those Fanghetto lovers who live there now and will live there in the future). They aim to provide knowledge about the history and to capture the voices, images and stories of Fanghetto for the future.
FANGHETTO is a dreamy beautiful medieval village in the Ligurian mountains not far from the Mediterranean sea. The first settlement dates approximately from the 12th century, but evidence shows that todays’ borgo at least existed since the 16th Century. The inhabitants from Fanghetto made their living by olive and goat farming. A small mountain road connected Fanghetto with the other villages of the hilly Roya Valley. Until the late sixties of the last century the village was alive with shops, bars, a school and many craftsmen, in those days about 200 people lived in Fanghetto. After the second world war inhabitants left the village, attracted by better work opportunities, but in the 1960s Fanghetto was discovered by curious artists from Northern Europe, and life in Fanghetto changed.
The project is collecting the old traditional stories still present in the village and documents the authentic voices of people raised in Fanghetto before the second world war and of those who discovered the village in the 1960s. The Fanghetto Stories Project is work-in-progress and will give you access to this village history (with audio & video material and texts in Italian, English and partly Dutch).