Collection of handmade bird calls from the Veneto region.

These bird calls were mostly purchased in Castelfranco Veneto by my husband, Edward F. Tuttle, a Romance Philologist and Italian dialectologist at UCLA. He assembled them while doing research on folk culture at Fanzolo, and methods of trapping birds, which resulted in the pamphlet he personally printed on his home letter press for the local community, with the title in the local Veneto dialect, El tragente de osei (‘the bird-hunter’). While teaching Italian Folklore and Oral History at UCLA, I often used this collection to speak about and demonstrate orality and the importance of aural competency for domestic economies.

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