Giovanni Ginobili
Category: Writers and scholars
Born in Petriolo on January 24th, 1892 – Died in Macerata on October 17th, 1973.
Giovanni was born on January 24th, 1892 in an ancient family of Petriolo, the Ginobilis, also known with the name “Conte”.
The members of his family were largely educators: Luigi, his father, worked as a teacher at the primary school; his grandfather, Giovanni, was a teacher and a patriot (he was member of the Municipal Council which collected the votes for the subscription to Vittorio Emanuele II’s constitutional monarchy).
“Nanni de lu conde” ’s homonym grandson, Giovanni Ginobili, spent his childhood and part of his youth in Romania, where he learnt the local language and studied the custom and traditions. He deepened this knowledge through Carmen Syilva’s books, which influenced his future education as a folklorist and dialectologist. Thanks to this book, he had the opportunity to know an almost unknown local community of shepherds, in the area of Scrofantina, located among the mountains surrounding the city of Valona. Giovanni Ginobili studied customs and traditions of the Romanian shepherds, translating in Italian their legendary songs and poems telling the heroic deeds against Turkish and Albanian people.
He studied as a teacher in Jesi. Then, since 1920, he worked first as a substitute teacher at the primary schools in the area of Ancona, later he became stable in Sirolo. After, he decided to move to Macerata, the city where he spent the largest part of his career between 1926 and 1960, the year when he retired.
Thanks to his ability in writing poems and music, he wrote many educative songs, which were published in well-known school magazines, such as “I diritti della scuola”, “Rivista di Educazione Materna”, “La voce delle maestre dell’asilo” and, above all the Florentine “Corriere musicale dei piccoli”, for which he collaborated.
During his youth, Ginobili wrote several educative-patriotic comedies and musicals to be played in live performances, such as “Festa della scuola”. Many others of his creations were published: “Resurrezione italica”, “Danza delle bambole”, “Fantasie infantili” and “Figlio di eroe”. The author donated the original manuscripts of other drama pieces to Macerata’s Mozzi-Borgetti Library; in addition, he also made a donation of his correspondence with the associate Lino Liviabella, from Macerata, the appreciated executive director of Parma’s “A. Boito” Musical Conservatory.
Giovanni Ginobili’s fame is certainly linked to his extraordinary activity as a folklorist and dialectologist, unique in Le Marche, and maybe unrivaled.
He felt a great disappointment for being late in using a great amount of old folkloristic materials. The times when ancient traditions would have been abandoned had already came: the progressive disappearance of dialects, replaced by the national language; the lessen of analphabetism; the spreading of culture. Despite many obstacles, he managed to preserve more than 200 popular songs. The sad awareness of the vanishing of the vernacular language made Giovanni Ginobili write the most useful among his literary works: “Glossario del dialetto natio e del maceratese”.
The “Glossario dei dialetti di Macerata e Petriolo” was published in 1963. Initially, it contained 6,000 entries. Progressively, the author enriched it with three attachments: 15,000 new entries for his Glossario.
The final outcome: a valuable work, appreciated by many Italian and foreign glottologists. They applauded its accuracy and completeness. It’s because of its completeness if “Glossario dei dialetti di Macerata e Petriolo” achieved the first rank among the vernacular vocabularies of Le Marche (see also: Conti Spotti; Egidi).
