The History of Sex: South of France -- Roma vs. Amor -- (Chap. III, Pt. 7)

I don't know if William's prayer was answered, but I was certainly smitten.

So I've come to the langue d'oc itself to meet a real, live troubadour.

Fittingly, Gerard Zuchetto hails from Carcassonne, one of the last medieval walled cities in Europe, deep in la terre du troubadour.

His parents were Italian Communists who moved to southwest France after the War.

'For us, it was easier to become integrated speaking Occitan than it was speaking French.' He smiles wistfully. 'Back then Occitan was widely spoken. Now it's mainly spoken in the market.'

As a modern-day minstrel, Gerard sings in medieval Occitan with his wife and their Troubadours Art Ensemble, having fallen in love with the music of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at university in the 1970s. 'It was the era of Woodstock and revival, when people focused on the roots of music and poetry.'

LOVE ME DO

Sitting in a café just inside the magnificent main gate of the old town—it has a drawbridge and everything—Gerard scribbles a Latin palindrome on a piece of paper: ROMA and AMOR.

For the troubadours, love wasn't a spiritual ideal dictated from on high by Rome but a romantic—and carnal—emotion experienced by individuals.

'The troubadours didn't invent love itself, of course, but they invented the idea of writing about the emotion of love. For them, love was a feeling that existed outside of God, between two people, who could be a woman and a woman, a man and a woman, or a man and man. It was very original and revolutionary. It was the first time that artists thought as artists: they wrote as people whose work would last down the centuries.'

'When you listen to the songs of Lou Reed or Joe Cocker,'—he continues, dating his own tastes to the late twentieth century—'they're the same themes: "my love may not really love me" or "I'm not sure I love her" and so on. All of these things were written by the troubadours. In pop or punk music, the same sentiments are written about in different words, but they're the same sentiments.'

Maybe it's just me, but that sounds a bit sad.

'So you mean after all these centuries, men and women are still asking the same questions about love?'

'The music has changed—but the lyrics, not much. It seems we haven't evolved much. The sentiments are the same as they were in antiquity.'

You can sample some of Gerard's troubadour music here.