Title: Folklore Introduces: Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik
Abstract: MY "ROOTS"I was born in Koper, at the seaside, in an area that is officially bilingual, Slovenian-Italian, and situated close to what is now the former Yugoslav-Italian border.In a way I feel this has marked my view, which I could say to have been curious and opening towards the horizon.As a little girl, I was looking from the home balcony towards the Debeli rtič cape, where there remains the open European border with Italy, and beyond toward Grado/Monfalcone -which is as far as you could see on a sunny day.And I kept saying that it was Venice.Far beyond the hills on the north side, also when the weather was nice, you could see the highest Slovenian mountain, Triglav, and far to the right, in the east, there was Nanos, a milestone of a kind between the Primorska region and Central Slovenia.Coming from the southeast and south, the miraculous Istrian landscape was radiating, that is, its Slovenian part that had always been the natural hinterland of three Slovenian seaside towns -Koper, Izola and Piran, as well as the peninsular Croatian part eating into the waves of the northern Adriatic Sea.A special place of my childhood -apart from Koper -was Trst/Trieste: even in socialism it was a habit (and tradition) for numerous women from the Istrian hinterland to work for wealthy Trieste families