Within the exhibition Change! Yesterday, today, tomorrow. The Po, the exhibition project Memories of water. Words and images presents the work carried out by the Italian Linguistic Atlas, an institute founded in 1924 under the direction of Matteo Giulio Bartoli (1873 – 1946) at the University of Turin, with the support of the Friulian Philological Society.

The exhibition explores some of the themes addressed by the exhibition Change!, observing them through the interpretative lens of language, popular culture, and collective memory: from the management of water according to sustainability criteria typical of pre-industrial uses, to that of landscape construction and care as a vital element, up to the parallel between biodiversity (represented by various animal and plant species) and the rich dialectal terminological wealth documented by the Italian Linguistic Atlas.

The Italian Linguistic Atlas (ALI) is a systematic collection of geographical maps on which are reproduced, for each explored Italian locality, the corresponding dialectal translations of a concept or notion or phrase, collected from the oral tradition of the people. With its over 5 million dialectal cards and almost 10,000 ethnographic photographs of very high documentary value, it represents the greatest national dialectological enterprise and one of the largest among those published or in progress in Europe and the rest of the world.

The exhibition aims to highlight in particular the skills and merits of the first voice collector, Ugo Pellis (1882 – 1943), with a selection of cards – published in print volumes since 1995 – and dialectal cards, tools used for data collection, and photographs taken in the Thirties and Forties of the Twentieth Century in northern Italy, in support of the linguistic data.

In particular, it illustrates the ways in which the inseparable connection between linguistic data and ethnographic data is treated both in the voice collection phase, during which field researchers used images and photographs to elicit dialectal translations, and in the results publication phase. The iconographic data assumes particular importance because, in addition to being a crucial element of this process, it represents today a precious testimony of rural Italy in the first half of the Twentieth Century.