How do you say ‘to work (too much)’ in the Marchigiano dialect?
(And because we say it with pride, sarcasm, and a strange form of love.)
“How does it feel to treat me like you do when you laid your hands upon me…”
In 1983, New Order sang about toxic love. In 2025, we put our calloused hands of the past into it. Those who didn’t choose ‘fadiga’ — they inherited it.
Yes, because in Marche we don’t work, we: fadiga, laora, sgobbà, tribbulà, fatighèr, mastricià, lavurèr…
Every valley, every hill, every farmhouse has its favorite way of saying: me I’m working my tail off. But beware: it’s not just a complaint. It’s peasant semiotics, hoe-handled philosophy, poetics of doing. The Marchigian “fadiga” is a semantic field all our own. Inside it, there’s physical tiredness, yes, but also identity: who you are, how much you’re worth, what you’ve built, and how you’ve learned never to boast about it.Working is tiring. But talking about work is punk.
In a world that shouts “hustle”, “grind”, “performance” we respond with: “struggle”, “toil”, “work hard” — and a shrug. Because here, work is not flaunted, it is done. Then you go home, eat, and say: “All good. It’s nothing.”
It’s our own way of not burdening, not weighing people down, of hiding dignity within irony. And in the end, isn’t that also a philosophical act?
Fatigue as a value system
If you had asked Barthes or Bourdieu, they would have told you that:
fatigue is a language. a symbol. a cultural device.
We say it is the root of our creative resistance. It’s knowing how to do well without saying too much. It’s asking for nothing, but leaving a mark.
“How does it feel… to call it fadiga?”
So let’s listen to them again, the New Order, but through a Marche lens:
“How does it feel when you laid your hands upon me and called it… fadiga, laorà, sgobbà, penà, lavurèr, tribbulà, mastricià, fatighèr?”
What does it feel like to lay your hands on the past and feel it still burning?
MarcheLove doesn’t sell slogans.
It transforms hard words into living art. It collects the verbs of toil and silkscreens them, illustrates them, prints them. So they won’t be lost. Because every Marche “fadiga” deserves its manifesto.
And you? What do you call work in your area? Tell us. Write it down. Stick it on a wall. Then we’ll take care of turning it into culture.
