Women of Valcellina challenged mountains, history
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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women from the Valcellina mountains in Friuli, Italy, travelled to northern Italy to sell wooden tools and kitchen utensils, becoming known as sedonere.
These women left their families and homes to seek economic opportunity, walking for weeks or months while carrying their goods in carts. They slept in barns and stables, facing hardship and loneliness to support their families in impoverished, isolated mountain communities. The documentary FORA PAL MONT.
I passi rimasti directed by Lorena Trevisan and Michele Pastrello, features six sedonere, aged 91 to 102, who share their personal experiences. These journeys provided the women with a degree of independence outside their traditional roles, allowing them to manage money and make decisions while navigating a new world. Though their work was essential to their families’ survival, their contributions were often overlooked in official histories.
Sociologist Casimira Grandi described this phenomenon as a “presence absence”, noting that women’s crucial economic and social roles were frequently absent from formal records. The filmmakers highlight how the sedonere defied expectations by performing work typically reserved for men. Their stories, originating in the Valcellina, now offer a contemporary message about female emancipation as a gradual process built by many individuals across different social classes.
The documentary has been selected for several Italian film festivals, including Le Giornate della Luce and Edera Film Festival, and received an Honorable Mention from the Vittorio De Seta Award in 2026.
