Wanderers of Female Knowledge: Witches, Sibyls, Seers
In the cultural semiotics of the Marche region, there is a term that is not easily circumscribed: le strolleche.
These figures are not simple “witches”: they belong neither to ecclesiastical demonology nor to fantasy illustrations. They are folk wise women, bridges between bodily experience, empirical observation, and collective cultural memory. In every village there was at least one: the woman who knew about herbs, the body, the moon, and dreams. Her words carried weight not because they were authorized, but because they were effective (in terms of perceived result and change).
From an anthropological perspective, strolleche embody the idea that knowledge is neither monolithic nor hierarchical, but distributed: it is not found in libraries, but in fields, gestures, and stories. Their presence is not folkloric decoration: it is epistemic performance — knowing how to do, knowing how to see, knowing how to tell.
Semiotic-wise, strolleca is a sign that challenges opposites:
- she is neither a canonical heroine nor a villain
- she is neither institutional science nor naive superstition
She is a field of interpretation where the subject is not defined by dominant power but by everyday interpretive processes. In this sense, strolleche are not just folklore figures: they are semiotic agents, creators of meaning in social relationships and in the community–nature interaction.
The translation “blessed be STROLLECA me” is not a gimmick: it is a way to overturn a discursive paradigm that has marginalized this knowledge as irrational. Here, the grammar of dialect becomes cultural resistance, and the strolleca emerges as a strategist of non-institutional knowledge.
In every stone of Marche’s villages, on every hillside path, the language of the strolleche continues to exist. Not hidden, but oscillating between visible and invisible — like every living language that does not just signify, but creates worlds.
