When something happens in Orentano, you hear it before you see it. Two bands carry the village’s soundtrack: a folklore marching band with a frog for a mascot, and a concert band named after a maestro. Between them they open the sagre, the summer evenings, the Carnevale parades and most things in between. If you hear drums, follow them.
The Sound of the Village
La Ranocchia & the Filarmonica Leone Lotti
La Ranocchia — the frog of the Padule
The Complesso Folkloristico "La Ranocchia" was born in 1956, the same year as the first Carnevale, as a home-made "jazz band" of village music lovers. By 1960 it had become a proper marching band with red, yellow and blue uniforms — and a name chosen with a smile: from Orentano you can hear the frogs croaking in the nearby Padule marsh.
The marsh is in its instruments too: alongside the brass and drums march folk instruments modelled on the old eel-fishing tools of the wetland — the Nassa, the Bertivello, the Zucca. Under maestro Leone Lotti, then his son Giovanni and maestro Duilio Neri, the band grew past a hundred and twenty members and carried the village’s name a long way: Rome’s festa de' Noantri in Trastevere, the Carnevale of Viareggio, official band of Verona’s Bacanal del Gnoco carnival, and Lugano’s Festa dell’Uva, where it represented Italy. Its trademark remains what the village calls the sfilare perfetto — the perfect parade step — with the mascottes, the smallest members, marching in front.
The Filarmonica "Leone Lotti"
The village’s concert band bears the name of the maestro who first directed La Ranocchia. The Filarmonica "Leone Lotti" plays the other half of the village’s calendar — the patron feast of San Lorenzo, the summer concerts in the piazza, the solemn moments the marching band’s frog would be too cheeky for. Many players march in one band and sit in the other; in a village this size, music is a family affair.
To catch either of them, check what’s on — concerts and parades all pass through the events calendar.