Marchigian Relational Geography: Staying, Choosing, Clinging, Excluding
In meme-English, this might sound like “Leftovers, Picked Ones, Can’t Get Off This Ride, Wildly Unpairable”. But in the Marche dialect, these categories aren’t jokes: they’re shared social maps, everyday legends of how people relate within a territorial community.
‘RMASTI — The Leftlovers
Not “losers,” but witnesses to a relationship with time and space. Being a rmaste means staying in a place, in memories, in others’ gazes. It’s not a social desktop—it’s a cognitive-affective landscape. In this sense, the community is a semantic field where rmaste means “persistence,” historical attachment to a relational and territorial context.
‘RCAPATI — The Picked Ones
The root rcapato literally means a recovered scrap, but metaphorically it indicates someone who has found their place in the social-affective world. Not just “chosen”: processually selected by experience, history, and practices of attachment, arranging and giving back. Here, the dialect recognizes capacity for personal transformation: you are not just what you are, but what you become in relationships.
PICCICATI — Can’t Get Off This Ride
A corruption of appiccicati, it describes those who can’t stand being alone: “They’re always ppiccicati, gives me diabetes!” Being piccicati isn’t a flaw—it’s a phenomenological quality of intercorporeality: two bodies coexisting, responding, mirroring, sending continuous signals. Semioticly, it’s a sign of ongoing interaction: not an end, but extended coexistence.
FORASTECHI — Wildly Unpairable
From the popular Latin foras (“outside”), forastechi designates those who are “hard to pair,” shy, almost social fauna operating autonomously. Not marginality—it’s otherness, and in that otherness lies anthropological value. Here, community dialectics becomes social ecology: who stays, who stays out, who seeks, who refuses.
What does this taxonomy tell us? That language isn’t a sterile label, but a living social device: it shapes and negotiates affective expectations, regulations, and resistances. Words don’t describe relationships—they articulate, intervene in, and define them. And this is why, in MarcheLove, we turned them into visual figures, signs of a relational value system found nowhere else.
