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Volunteer Voices – From Italy to Trimontium

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Volunteer Voices – From Italy to Trimontium
Feb 18th 2024 | Thania M Flores

The Life of a Reenactor

by Lola Olga

How it started

I have always had a passion for history and after my university degree in history I had to put it aside to find a job. Fortunately, reenactment has been the way to spread my historical knowledge and to make good use of what I have learnt in my studies. My journey as a reenactor started in 2012, when a friend invited me to join him and his group for a Late Medieval event. Twelve years have gone by and it will be extremely difficult to live without it.

What makes you a reenactor?

To be a good reenactor you needn’t be young or old, man or woman, blond or black haired, you have to be curious and be ready to abide by the rules of history. Sometimes to stand out it’s better doing less.

For example sometimes it is said that children are the best reenactors because they are themselves. They do have to wear historically accurate clothes though.

A woman wearing a tunic and a pointy hat, holding a musical instrument
A woman reenacting a Carolingian scene seated and playing the pipes, the wall behind her has frescoes
Photo by Luciano Guernici. Reeneactment scene, Carolingian period, at the Archeodromo, Poggibonsi, Siena italy.

How do you choose a historical period?

There is no correct answer to this question. It depends on you and on the opportunities that may present themselves. In my experience, I started with the Late Middle Ages because in Tuscany it was the most common historical period for reenactment and, first of all, because a friend of mine invited me to join them. Then my interest grew and my perspectives widened; my desire to go back in time grew as well.

My life as a reenactor has been full of good opportunities. I started to reconstruct the Carolingian period because near Siena an open-air museum dedicated to the Carolingian Era opened and they needed people to make their village come alive on special occasions. Then the Ostrogoths arrived because some dear friends were organizing a Longbard event in northern Italy (Cividale) and to take part in it my husband, daughter and I had to go backward in time to fit in with the event. Last but not least, Antiquity has arrived through an invitation to an Etruscan event in Populonia. Now I am getting ready to try out the Roman Imperial period. Curiosity is the trigger, and good chances, of course.

What does it mean being a woman in living history?

A woman in Carolingian clothes appears smiling in front of a house and holding wool.

I must say that, at the beginning, I struggled with the idea of a woman that lived most of her life in the shade of men, spinning to make fabric, raising children and taking care of the house and courtyard. They could not fight, they could not choose a job they liked and they couldn’t be what they might have wanted to be – in a modern day way of thinking.

Yet, there is beauty in the change and in the continuous discovery of a life that, at first sight, seemed to have no charm and no fun… But the more you dig, the more you discover that these women had fun in their own ways. As a reenactor and a woman, the difficulty lies in discovering little traces of lives that have been forgotten, and giving them a new light, respecting their own time and habits, to make it plausible for visitors.

I like to reconstruct women from lower social classes because their lives were multi-faceted and more interesting to explain to visitors during living history events.

What is my experience as a volunteer at Trimontium?

My volunteering at Trimontium started less than a year ago and so far it’s been a great experience. Writing social media posts about Roman history is helping me to learn more details about their history and customs. Every time I look for a new subject for a social media post I always end up finding some interesting little hints about a populace that I have been studying since primary school, and of whom I see traces  everywhere, living in Italy. But thanks to Trimontium now I am looking at it with different eyes, more keen ones.

https://www.instagram.com/thesyrinxplayer

https://www.facebook.com/LupulaHWP

https://thepanflutediary.wordpress.com/

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