La sacca del diavolo

La sacca del diavolo is a weekly Radio Popolare journey through folk music in its broadest and most unruly sense. The show treats acoustic, ethnic, traditional, oral, and popular music as one connected field of memory. It is patient but never inert. A single song can become a route into seasonal rites, religious syncretism, regional language, old instruments, labor history, or the politics carried by a chorus. The program often starts from the present, then steps backward. A rugby result can lead into ideas of support and community. A date can open toward ballads about defiance, women, fathers, lovers, and different endings from the usual tragic moral. Spring brings scaccia marzo, ciamal'erba, cowbells, propitiatory noise, schoolchildren, pagan residues, and Catholic overlays. Near Easter, the show turns toward death, resurrection, nature, and renewal without separating belief from older seasonal patterns. Its musical map is wide. Episodes move through Finland, Genoese song, libertarian song, Irish groups, Yiddish workers' music, Salentino, Breton, Arabic-inflected singing, English Morris traditions, and Italian popular voices. The connective tissue is cultural attention. Giancarlo Nostrini gives the music room, then surrounds it with places, dates, social uses, and remembered names. The result feels closer to a radio essay than a conventional interview show. It is also openly fond of digression. That looseness is part of the texture, because the show follows the way folk material actually travels, by fragments, associations, rituals, performers, festivals, and communities. Politics enters through song rather than slogans. War, oppression, labor, libertarian memory, peace, and civil grief appear as things people have sung about, marched with, or inherited. The show is best for listeners who want discovery with roots still attached. It asks for attention, but it gives back a dense, humane sense of music as lived history.