“GeoMay” Day in Torniella-Piloni, Tuscany

Events, Maps

In Italian May is “Maggio”, so “Maggeo” is a sort of fusion between the name of the month and the geo- prefix. Since in 2020 it is not possible to attend May Day celebrations in person, in Italy and many other parts of the world, we try to re-enact some past May Day events by simulating their unfolding with a combination of mapping supports, videos and photos.

Piloni, photo by Pio Spinosi. If you can guess the year please write to micalosapevo@pibinko.org

As a Maggeo prototype we took the 2009 May Day in the Farma Valley, in Tuscany, about 100 km South of Florence. On that occasion, with the BuioMetria Partecipativa project we followed all the celebration. This starts normally at 8.30AM in the Piloni square with a sandwich with marinated anchovies + red wine (or soda if you can’t have wine), and ends around noon at the Torniella football field, after several other stops of this type. At the end of the march, some people possibly end up having too many marinated anchovies, but the spirit of the is May Day is very strong (in all ways).

Along the walk from Piloni to Torniella, we asked to as many people as possible “how dark is the sky above the Farma bridge?” (before posing the question we were giving notions on light pollution and night sky quality measurement, so that our counterpart would not be giving random numbers).

  • The intial zoom level of the map is intentionally set so that people can first understand where the Farma Valley is located on Earth. As Andrea the old bartender used to say: “the problem is not finding the bar in Torniella…the problem is finding Torniella”.
  • In the search window below you can type something, and the system will tell you if in the video there is a matching place. Even a single letter will do.
  • If you click on the name of a place you will be brought to the corresponding section of the “How dark is the sky in Maremma?” video. The video is subtitled in English.
  • We are missing images of a couple of the official “stops”…should you happen to have some footage, please write to micalosapevo@pibinko.org
  • FYI: parts of this video (together with other buiometria partecipativa videos) were used in 2010 in a report by TG2 (one of the national TV news services)

For more information and booking: micalosapevo@pibinko.org