A woman’s hands

In the exhibition From Cajeta to Circe

Pinacoteca Comunale di Gaeta Antonio Sapone

Curator Laura VdB Facchini, March 12 to April 12 2023

Hands that care and hands that bewitch.

Cajeta travelled the seas with Aeneas and choose to follow him on Tyrrhenian coasts. She lived there till she died and was buried there as well.

Although in northern Europe and Japan witches are traditionally old and have large gnarled hands, those in the photo belong to the sweetest woman in our Piemontese village.

She is now 93 years old and took care of everybody around her for most of her live, her parents, her husband, her niece, her neighbors. Like Cajeta she has no children of her own. She took us with her to the cemetery and introduced us to most of the dead. You can see her walking from her little plot of land with a hoe or a rake on her shoulder, a basket of apples in the other hand and a folded newspaper like a little roof on her head against the rain.

Down the road beyond the cemetery we find a prosperous bar. The owner is in her early forties. She is handsome and has an easy way with her customers who are mostly male, some old and infirm, some local peasants, a lot of merchants from the large market opposite to her bar, groups of hunters with their bright orange jackets. So far none of them are changed into pigs but the men are on their guard and do not oppose her.

Acknowledgements

On the exhibition From Cajeta to Circe.

Link to catalogue exhibition