Town and country form separate worlds in Locorotondo. In dialect the line of demarcation is the bygone towered wall which a mid-nineteenth-century town administration razed. A peasant is, in dialect, a “man of the outside” (l'omme de feuore); townsmen are from “inside” (de jinte). People from the inside and from the outside ridicule each other's dialect and talk about drawls which a foreigner untrained in linguistics can barely perceive. There has been, and continues to be, animosity and distrust between those socialized in town and those socialized in the country, although such feelings are weaker in recent times than before. This division began in the early nineteenth century, and it is based upon social class and ways of earning a living, including the habits of work which accompany them. This chapter will describe the town, its atmosphere, and its population, and draw some contrasts with the “people of the outside,” particularly around the theme of work.

THE TOWN AND ITS ATMOSPHERE

In 1982 Locorotondo's town center seemed charged with urban modernity – bustling auto traffic, a skyline sprouting construction cranes, middle-class men in blue jeans standing about in the town square, teens fondling in the park in the early afternoon, chic little shops with English names like “Man, Lady, Baby Shop,” over the door, and semi-pornographic movies playing at the movie house – but a little questioning soon showed that a process of radically changing social reality had formed most adult Locorotondesi.