Four (or five) Tuscan repertoires

Regarding rituals and musical traditions, we are confronted today with 4 repertoires: Firenze, Livorno, Pitigliano, Siena. These are what remained of the many different local traditions in postwar Tuscany, when Leo Levi made his campaign. These 4 repertoires reflect quite evidently some aspect of Jewish history in the region: the material from Pitigliano, as recorded by Levi in the '50s and then fifty years later by Francesco Spagnolo, belongs to the Italian rite, testimony to the first settlements of Jews of Roman origin. Livorno is a Western Sephardic repertoire, with deep ties to the Spanish and Portuguese tradition and to communities in North Africa. What remains of the Siena repertoire, a handful of melodies and no more, shows an interesting overlap of the two traditions: Florence, that adopted in its Tempio Maggiore the Sephardic ritual, mirrors in many aspects the Livorno tradition, although with notable exceptions; and at the time of Levi, still boasted a separate Italian repertoire, of which not much is still available unfortunately – so that the repertoires we should be speaking of are actually 5 – Pitigliano, Livorno, Firenze (Italian), Firenze (Sephardic) and Siena.