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Dazzling fashion parade by Dolce & Gabbana in the streets of Naples

11/7/2016

 
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​Last Friday, July the 8th, Dolce & Gabbana presented, in a spectacular fashion, their 2016 alta moda collection in the cobblestoned streets of Naples' historic centre turning via San Gregorio Armeno, the street famous for the Neapolitan nativity crib shops which line it, and piazza San Gaetano into an amazingly picturesque catwalk under the gaze of the guest of honour, Sophia Loren. Here is how Fashionista, the Financial Times, and Il Corriere della Sera described the event followed by three short videos of the parade:    

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DOLCE & GABBANA TAKES OVER NAPLES FOR A WILD 'ALTA MODA' WEEKEND
The Italian house's answer to couture was inspired by Sophia Loren, who grew up not far from the show's location.

MAURA BRANNIGAN, JUL 12, 2016

Not one month after Dolce & Gabbana staged a celebrity millennial-filled men's show in Milan, the Italian fashion house kicked things up a notch for its Alta Moda show in Naples on Saturday. As Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana's answer to couture, the raucous event is known to spare no expense — both in terms of clothing and entertainment. This season's celebration mirrored that of a street festival, not unlike the brand's fall 2016 campaign, which captures local civilians alongside models. For Alta Moda, Dolce & Gabbana took over an entire stretch of the city, incorporating a brass band, fireworks and a gilded velvet bandstand where the evening's guest of honor, Sophia Loren, sat front and center.

Loren has served as a muse to the Italian house for some time now, most recently appearing in the brand's latest fragrance film this past January. But this collection was explicitly inspired by the 81-year-old actress, who grew up not far from Naples and shot many of her classic movies there, as well. Indeed, all 30 of the larger-than-life looks were fit for true Italian diva; each gown, tuxedo and bodice was more elaborately embellished and intricately detailed than the next. 

While we weren't there to watch the extravaganza unfold in-person, there was, of course, quite a bit of Instagram footage, thanks to the crowd's many VIP guests. Read on to see all the highlights from Dolce & Gabbana's Alta Moda show and wild weekend in Naples.

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Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda Naples show reportThe design duo honours Sophia

Loren with a huge Neapolitan homecoming on the city’s streets

JULY 10, 2016; by: Jo Ellison

Despite being the third-largest metropolitan area in Italy, with about three million inhabitants and one of the world’s busiest ports, Naples perhaps lacks the fashionable urgency of its urban rivals. Mostly, the city is tarnished by its reputation for social and political violence.

Even today, the southern city must wrestle with the popular culture that defines it. Fans of the elusive novelist Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet understand the town as bestowing on its children a painful life sentence which psychologically imprisons them within the city walls. Fans of the film and now television series Gomorrah will recognise the city as one of infinite corruption and crime.

And yet for all its raggedy grime Naples still radiates a uniquely seductive glamour, luring film directors, artists and writers to its quarters with its labyrinthine geography, lusty temperatures and earthy humour. This weekend, the city chalked up another amore, the design duo Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce, who staged their 99-look Alta Moda show on the tiny cobbled streets of the city’s oldest quarter and before an invited audience of clients and editors who were there as their guests.

The occasion was designed to coincide with a civic ceremony: the weekend took place as Sophia Loren, the 81-year-old actress and honorary Neapolitan (she was born in Rome and grew up 30 miles or so beyond the city limits) was presented with the keys to the city. The star of a score of Naples-set films and the woman perhaps most responsible for putting the city on the world map (or at least ensuring a few millions eyeballs might swivel in its direction), the actress has as chequered a relationship with her homeland as anyone. In 1982, she served 17 days of a 30-day jail sentence for tax offences committed in 1974. Although she was cleared of all wrongdoing in 2013, after a long legal battle, her visits these days are rare. She had been persuaded to return for this honour, according to Gabbana, on the agreement that their show attend her.

It was a risky destination. The designers ordinarily commandeer exotic, far more exclusive locations to showcase the one-of-a-kind gowns that cost tens of thousands of pounds and are bought by the kind of clients who bring their bodyguards as plus ones. Here the show was set on the street; the catwalk ran down the tiny alleyway of Via San Gregorio Armeno in the city’s artisanal centre before family-owned stores selling nativity sets, painted drums, wooden figurines and other traditional tchotchkes. Chinese clients and Dallas-based billionaires wearing jewel-encrusted gowns and princess tiaras perched on gold-painted chairs, while shopkeepers did a brisk trade in fans, and the street became a mirror of selfies. Locals hung off the surrounding balconies and crowded around guard rails to catch a better view. It was a security nightmare.

“It’s the hardest, most complicated show we have ever undertaken”, explained Dolce as a brass band tuned up alongside him ready to lead the fashion parade. “But power to the people,” he continued. “The street experience is unique, but it made sense to us because this is the street of the artisans. Every family here lives in the culture and is rooted in their trade — just like Alta Moda.”

Of the Neapolitan personality he was effusive: “Napoli is one of the most creative cities on earth,” he insisted. “The people think completely differently, they have another type of brain, they live well. They enjoy their lives. And they don’t want to change. That’s why we wanted to come here.”

Their collection was a paean to the woman of the hour and the city’s diverse heritage — minus the bullet holes: a slim pencil skirt and white bodice opened the show, a look first imagined in The Gold of Naples, Loren’s 1954 film by Vittorio De Sica; fitted dresses with ruched sleeves and flattering hemlines were decorated with roses — Loren’s favourite flower; baroque bejewelled gold capes recalled Saint Januarius, the city’s patron saint; suit jackets were left with dangling threads in honour of its famous tailors; a sky blue silk skirt was embroidered with a washing line of garments; a blousey bodice made in the checks of a pizzeria tablecloth. There were towering gold head pieces, like the religious shrines one sees by the roadside. And a Rum baba hat.

At times the Dolce experience can teeter towards pantomime, the references are so overt and direct. “It’s ironic”, laughed Dolce as he showed off an aqua silk football shirt sequinned with the name Maradona (who played for Napoli in the mid-80s) and the proud number 10. “Our clients want to have a bit of fun. That’s why they come to us.”


And so they do. The clients attending were uniformly dressed in past season’s Dolce, much of which had been purchased, no doubt, at the brand’s Neapolitan pop-up shop. They were a colourful, sparkly lot and this season’s offerings of postcard print needlepoints, gypsy dresses jangling with golden coins, and a souvenir skirt painted with a fishmonger’s catches would not have looked out of place. But there were also serious pieces. A long line black “mama” coat and the hand painted florals that decorated silk dresses and skirts were very sensible, and still very pretty. If the looks were unified by anything it was in their flattering wearability; few designers can project such confidence on a woman as well as Dolce & Gabbana can.
​

Ever Italian, a sense of fun was still foremost in everyone’s mind. At the show’s close the guests surged towards awaiting cars and the dinner and dancing ahead. As they picked over the uneven paving in their glittery Cinderella slippers a shower of golden confetti rained down. The gold of Naples, Dolce & Gabbana style. It was impossible not to fall for it.

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Dolce e Gabbana, la sfilata dedicata a Sophia Loren per le strade di Napoli

I due stilisti presentano l’alta moda all’ombra del Vesuvio con l’attrice. «È a lei che pensiamo quando disegniamo le nostre collezioni»

Paola Pollo; 8 luglio 2016

«Lo vuole un Dolce & Babà?». Nel chilometro vociante di Spaccanapoli da venerdì 8 luglio offrono una nuova delizia omaggio ai nuovi «eroi» della città, Domenico Dolce e Stefano Gabbana. Eccoli uscire commossi, in lacrime, davanti a San Lorenzo a raccogliere gli applausi delle ricchissime clienti della loro alta moda, di Sophia Loren, dei giornalisti ma soprattutto dei napoletani. Affacciati alle finestre, accalcati nei passaggi, stretti nei vicoli, in piedi negli angoli. Lo spettacolo nello spettacolo. I vestiti da perdere la testa e gli occhi sgranati di chi assiste a un miracolo. Perché in un certo senso è, San Gennaro non se ne abbia. Come chiamare diversamente l’aver portato nei vicoli di Napoli le donne più ricche al mondo per mostrar loro abiti fra i più lussuosi che si possa immaginare? Non solo. «Sophia, Sophia» urla la gente. E dai balconi srotolano gli striscioni con il suo nome ricamato in corsivo. «Una foto Sophia, una foto». Lei, la Loren, non si tira indietro. Come nei giorni scorsi non lo hanno mai fatto i due stilisti che hanno percorso in lungo e in largo la città.

AMORE A PRIMA VISTA CON LA CITTÀ

Stefano addirittura ha accettato l’invito di uno sconosciuto che lo ha contattato su Instagram e con lui l’altra mattina è andato in giro per i quartieri spagnoli con la vespa, entrando e uscendo da negozi e case. «Quello che stiamo vivendo — dicono all’unisono con tanta emozione — è questo bagno di folla, questo contatto con la gente che è unico e mai ci saremmo aspettati. Quando Sophia ci disse che era Napoli la città dove voleva sfilassimo in suo onore, siamo rimasti un po’ così. Non la conoscevamo così bene. Ma è stato amore subito. E ora che sta succedendo tutto così, diciamo che il mondo deve sapere che questa città non è solo problemi ma anche bellezza dei luoghi, opportunità artigianali, calore della gente».

L’OMAGGIO ALLA DIVA

Un innamoramento senza condizioni. Nato per caso, forse per questo ancor più travolgente. L’omaggio a Sophia Loren. «La nostra donna da sempre. Dagli inizi. È a lei che pensiamo quando disegniamo le nostre collezioni. Era giusto che fosse la protagonista unica di una nostra sfilata». Eccola allora materializzarsi ad ogni uscita: dalla prima, «L’Oro di Napoli» naturalmente, e poi un susseguirsi di citazioni «La contessa di Hong Kong», «Pane, amore e fantasia», «La ciociara», «Matrimoni all’italiana» e via senza tralasciare nulla della filmografia dell’attrice. «Chiunque e ovunque la conoscono. Qualsiasi generazione. Lei è come la Coca Cola», dicono i due, sostenitori in primis della cittadinanza all’attrice che il sabato 9 luglio il sindaco de Magistris le conferisce: «Le era dovuta. È molto emozionata. L’altra sera sono andata a trovarla e mi ha raccontato tante cose della sua infanzia a Pozzuoli. Dice che si ricorda persino delle buche nelle strade — racconta commosso Stefano Gabbana –. Diceva che il suo sogno era tornare a vedere quei luoghi: le ho detto “vai”. E così ha fatto. Ed era felicissima».

UNA SECURITY DA G8

I sogni sono desideri di felicità. Sembra che voi in questi giorni ne abbiate realizzati tanti di quei sogni, con la vostra moda, ma non solo: «Quando abbiamo cominciato con questo progetto d’alto moda volevamo valorizzare anche il nostro paese, l’Italia, che così bello e ricco di eccellenze alle quali tutti di rivolgono». Già: Taormina, Venezia, Capri, Portofino e ora Napoli. Qui lo sforzo logistico però è stato ancora più immane: un intero quartiere (fra l’altro non dei più facili) tirato a lucido (hanno ripulito le strade, sistemato gli arredi urbani – dalle fioriere alle panchine – e ultimato l’intervento al campanile di San Gregorio Armeno), cinquecento e più ospiti dislocati negli hotel più belli della città (dal Vesuvio, al Parkers al Romeo), centinaia e centinaia di auto a disposizione e una security da G8 la maggior parte scelta fra giovani di Napoli, oltre a una bella spinta commerciale: «Le botteghe tutte ci hanno accolto come non ce lo saremmo mai aspettato: ci siamo trovati protagonisti di presepi meravigliosi, non solo noi, ma anche la nostra moda. Sono riusciti a riprodurre molti nostri capi. E poi dolci e di ogni. Dal giro dell’altro giorno siamo rientrati pieni di regali».

LA SARTORIALITÀ CON IL TOCCO «POP»

Non che i due non siano da meno. Il bagno di folla per strada e sulla passerella. Sin dalle prime strepitose uscite. Con la banda locale di oltre cinquanta elementi che dal sagrato della basilica di San Paolo dà il via allo show e da quella porta escono sacre e profane: una processione mai vista. Ecco le gonne ad anfora di pizzo, i tubini, le bluse scollacciate e sbuffanti, i bustier, le balze, le ruches, i gonnelloni e le mini in un susseguirsi di lavorazioni e ricami e citazioni che sono un misto di passione e ironia: ecco le stampe ricamate con i quartieri spagnoli, il Vesuvio e le sue pendici a piccolo punto, i presepi di cristalli, le Madonna tempestate di pietre, i babà sui cappelli, la maglia di Maradona di seta, il corpetto con la fascia di Miss Eleganza che la Loren vinse nel 1950 e i taffetà con le rose gialle dipinte a mano che la diva adora da sempre. Sartorialità senza pecche con questa volta un tocco di «pop» (ci sono anche jeans e t-shirt e il tutto è meno drammatico) che rende questa collezione di alta moda più immediata e viva delle altre. «Penso che sia stata proprio ispirarsi a Sophia che ci ha portato inevitabilmente a pensare ad abiti più vicini alle gente», spiegano. Naturalmente con apoteosi delle uscite da Gattopardo nel gran finale. Signore clienti fuori-dalla-grazia-di-Dio dalla felicità, per lo show di venerdì sera e la presentazione dei gioielli a Villa Pignatelli. Sabato tocca ai signori, mariti o no, con la sfilata dedicata a loro a Castel Dell’Ovo e cena esclusiva a seguire con dress code «James Bond e Bond Girl». Mentre domenica party conclusivo al bagno Elena, nella baia di Palazzo Donn’Anna, tema Mambo Italiano e che le danze abbiano inizio.

Paola Pollo
8 luglio 2016 | 21:49




If you are a celebrity, no visit to via San Gregorio Armeno is complete without a photo of oneself with the figurine depicting you that the local craftsmen are famous for making each year, apart from the usual characters you would expect to see in a Nativity scene, and which are hugely popular with visitors to the street.   

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The dresses designed by Dolce&Gabbana for their 2016 alta moda collection are, of course, all very beautiful and they all bear the label's signature playful and theatrical aesthetic but there is one "dress" in particular which caught our eye and it's the one in the photo below which is inspired by the beloved patron Saint of Naples, San Gennaro (Saint Januarius). Unlike other Saints, San Gennaro's iconography is not terribly exciting: he is represented unbearded, wearing a bishop's miter and mantle. If you visit the Duomo di Napoli, apart from the magnificent chapel dedicated to the Saint, one can also visit the Museum of the Treasure of San Gennaro, which is located next to the Duomo. The museum houses hundreds of priceless art works and donations made to the Saint by Popes, Kings, Emperors, aristocrats and ordinary people over seven centuries and one of the items on display is a golden miter studded with 3964 precious stones made in 1713 by goldsmith Matteo Treglia and considered one of the most precious jewels in the world. This particular mitre is the inspiration behind Dolce&Gabbana's remarkable "dress"! 

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San Gennaro is an utterly fascinating Saint, famous for the alleged miracle of the annual liquefaction of his blood, yet many students have never heard of him! So, if you are curious, click here for the Wikipedia entry dedicated to the Saint and read the extracts and watch the videos we've included below. Buona lettura e buona visione!!!

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San Gennaro

Naples' patron St Januarius - Gens Januaria was his surname; his Christian name may have been Proculus - was a bishop of Benevento, who died in 305 during the persecutions of Diocletian. So far, so normal, and the impetuous Neapolitans need more than that to get their devotion going. A large dollop of legend helps.
Gennaro may have been going to visit a fellow Christian in jail in Pozzuoli when he was arrested and condemned to pray to pagan idols. When he refused, he may have been sentenced to be thrown to the wild beasts in Pozzuoli's amphitheatre, a sentence commuted to a more humane beheading when the Christian community rose up en masse.
​

Alternatively (and much more colourfully), the bishop may have been hurled into a fiery furnace (see Giuseppe Rivera's painting in the Duomo) and survived, been hauled in chains from Nola to Pozzuoli (a good 4okm/25 miles) and thrown to the wild beasts and survived, then declared to possess maglc powers and sentenced to beheading. Before the sentence was carried out in the Solfatara near Pozzuoli, his
persecutor
Timotheus may have been struck blind, and been cured by Gennaro, prompting the spontaneous conversion to Christianity of some 5,000 people.
But even martyr-ish derring-do is not sufficient for a superstitious people, obsessed by miraculous happenings. Happily for Gennaro, his blood was scooped up by a far-sighted old woman and, together with his body, kept in Pozzuoli (or Fuorigrotta) until Bishop Severus had them removed to the Catacombs of San Gennaro in the late fourth or early fifth century. It was here, local lore relates, that the saint pulled off the trick that endear him deeply and lastingly to the populace: his dessicated blood liquified.

The catacombs became
a centre of great devotion and San Gennaro's miraculous remains were fiercely contested. The Duke of Benevento grabbed them in 831; they
remained in Benevento until 1139,
when they were removed yet again to a monastery near Avellino. Rediscovered in 1480, they were returned to the Duomo in Naples in t497 . fheu current home - a purpose-built chapel in the Duomo - was created in the early 17th century.

Since the first documented liquefaction in
1389, the saint's blood has bubbled into action three times a year (on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, on 19 September (Gennaro's feast day) and on 16 December, always egged on by near-
hysterical crowds. Watchers pray, weep, ululate and grow increasingly frantic if Gennaro looks like letting them down, because the time taken for the blood to liquefy - usually between two minutes and an hour - at the September session is considered a portent of what lies in store for Naples and its citizens over the ensuring 12 months. The longer it takes, the more likely the city is to be stricken by disaster: earthquake, vulcanic eruption, cholera outbreaks, or a disastrous season for its football team.

Time Out Guide: Naples (Penguin Books; 2000)

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Saints alive - Blood rites

Naples's former mayor Antonio Bassolino once said that the city's patron saint, San Gennaro, should be called 'the mayor of saints' becase he had presided over all the city's most important moments. Credited with halting eruptions of Vesuvius and keeping calamitles, wars and epidemics at bay, San Gennaro has been an integral paft of Neapolitan life, and the object of devotion, down the ages. The Bourbons even awarded him the title of 'captain general' of their army. Naples felt the tumult of the 1960s Second Vatican Council in a very particular way: the Council decided to downgrade Gennaro to a local cult, causing an uproar of protest in the city (graffiti appeared with slogans like 'San Gennaro, futtenne!' (San Gennaro, don't give a damn about it!). He was officially reinstated to his position as patron saint by Pope John Paul II in 1980.


​The saint met his glorious end in 305, when he was beheaded in the Solfatara after surviving another gruesome attempt to kill him (various accounts have him thrown to the lions, incinerated in a fiery furnace or dragged in chains from Nola to Pozzuoli). His blood was scooped up by his far-sighted nanny Eusebia (other versions of the story simply say a pious old woman) and brought to what was to the catacombs of San Gennaro. About a century later, the first miraculous Iiquefaction of Gennaro's dried blood is said to have taken place, although the first official records of the occurrence date back only as far as 1389.


Gennaro's blood bubbles into action in a Duomo chapel three times a year: on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, on 19 September (his feast day) and on 16 December, each time egged on by hysterical crowds. The September feast day is a real event, covered by national media and attended by dignitaries. A group of women called the parenti di San Gennaro (relatives of San Gennaro) accompany the rltual with prayers and chants. The liquefaction is signalled with a white handkerchief.
It usually takes two minutes to an hour for the blood to liquefy, and the amount of time it takes is considered a portent of what lies in store for Naples, its citizens and its football team over the following 12 months. The longer it takes, the more likely the city is to be stricken by disaster. The phials and sumptuous bust of the saint containing bits of what is said to be his skull are exposed for the eight days following the liquefaction, then locked away again.

The liquefaction of saintly blood is something of a Neapolitan theme. Santa Patrizia and San Giovanni Battista both go liquid in San Gregorio Armeno. And various other saints liquefy too, or have liquefied in the past. Not for nothing is Naples known as urbs sanguinum  (city of blood). Neapolitans are generally pretty sceptical about saintly blood, but there's a great affection for the rituals. In any case, why take chances? "lt's not true," they'll tell you. "But I believe it anyway."

Time Out Guide: Naples (Time Out; 2005)

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Naples' patron saint: San Gennaro, the Bishop of Benevento, was beheaded in the amphitheatre in Pozzuoli on 19 September 305 during Diocletian's persecutions of the Christians. After the execution his followers collected his blood in two phials. These, it was said, would henceforth determine the Iife of the Neapolitans, for better or for worse.

The Neapolitans made San Gennaro into the most powerful saint in the Catholic church, and they hoped to be rewarded for their devotion. When they had exhausted all possibility of helping themselves, and in every hopeless situation whether financial or personal, great or small, they sought help from San Gennaro. The same holds true today. Whenever SSC Napoli, the local football team, faces a relegation battle supporters cry, "San Gennaro, aiutaci tu!"  ("San Gennaro, help us!") - not the usual chant to be heard on stadium terraces.

Good and bad omens: Belief in the saint's powers is directly associated with the two
phials of his blood, kept in the cathedral. On three days a year the blood is said to liquefy. If it fail s to do so it is considered a bad omen for the coming year. The three days when the miracle can occur are 19 September (the day ofthe saint's execution), the Saturday before the first Sunday in May (his birthday), and 16 December.

Proceedings are conducted according to a well-known ritual. When everything is
ready, the cardinal fetches the relic with the holy phials from a safe behind the altar. At this stage of the miracle, the dark substance half-filling the phials is in a solid state. The cardinal then raises the relic repeatedly in the air, in fiont of the congregation, at which point there is a storm of camera flashes and a collective gasp of anticipation.

Anyone who wants to be sure of capturing the moment of liquefaction has to keep the man standing next to the cardinal in view. He is specially chosen from the San Gennaro Committee (consisting of 10 nobles and two representatives of the people). From his gestures and calling, but above all from the cloth in his hand, it is possible for the people to see how the miracle is progressing. Waving the cloth from one side to another, the notary of the miracle cries out to the people: "Il miracolo, il miracolo!", the miracle has taken place. With luck, the substance in the phials is now blood-red and liquid.


At the same time, on a stone in a church in Pozzuoli. said to be the one on which Saint Gennaro was beheaded, a spot of blood takes on a brighter hue. With this, all the conditions are fulfilled to ensure that the next year is one to look forward to with hope.

Perhaps the most dramatic of these liquefactions occurred during the French occupation of Naples in Napoleonic times when a French army general with the
distinctly un-French name of Macdonald went along to witness it. When nothing happened he threatened to shoot the Archbishop and his staff if the blood did not liquefy within 10 minutes. It liquefied there and then. "The benign saint hearing the brutal menace had saved his devoted adherents just in time", reported a staunch believer. "Can one expect a better proof of the validity of the miracle?".

In 1980, when the region was hit, by a severe earthquake, the miracle of the blood failed to occur.

Theories of the cynics: Disbelieving eyes regard the whole ceremony as nothing more than a clever conjuring trick and have proposed all kinds of explanations, including the theory that it is caused by the heat generated by the exceptionally large congregation. The phials have not been opened to allow chemical examination of the contents. but in 1902 a Prolessor Sperindeo shone a ray of light through it and said it gave the spectrum of blood. In 1926 a Father Thurston, a Jesuit who was said to have no time for bogus miracles, declared that "the supposition of any trick or deliberate imposture is out of the question as candid opponents are now willing to admit... We are forced to accept the fact that contrary to all known laws a change goes on in the contents of the hermetically sealed vessel which makes them heavier and lighter in a ratio roughly but not exactly proportioned to their apparent bulk."

Even so, the importance attached to the miracle appears to be waning. Monsignor Pignatiello fears the decline may be irrevocable. Reflecting on one recent ceremony, he said: "The procession was short and only reached from the cathedral to Santa Chiara. The only ones who went were those who had to; the top representatives of the church, and the politicians. Hardly any of the ordinary people joined in." Even in the cathedral, he claims, the faithful were restrained, with no shouting or cries for help. 
"In the past," says the monsignor, "this religious festival was a cause of unadulterated joy, helping to promote a feeling of togetherness in the community."
The monsignor attributes declining interest to detrimental changes in modern society and thinks the original spirit of the occasion is irretrievably lost. That it was the church authorities themselves who wanted to curb this extremely unorthodox miracle, as some people claim, he flatly denies. In the words of Cardinal Michele Giordano, attempts are now being made "to rescue the spirit of the festival with theological reflection". By this, the cardinal is referring to theologians who are trying to put the San-Gennaro cult on to a purely religious footing, something unlikely to find favour with the people.

The church expresses the same misgivings about the modern lack of a spiritual element in other religious festivals in the city, such as the one honouring the Madonna del Carmine, the holy virgin from Mount Carmel. This festival begins in the market area of the city, and reaches its climax in a spectacular firework display over the church tower.


​There are many other religious festivals in the year. A festival to celebrate the virgin birth takes place on 8 September in the area
around the Piedigrotta church, thought to have been the site of a heathen temple. The mystical power of the various madonnas is regarded by the Neapolitan faithful as being only slightly less effective than that of San Gennaro. When they are in need of some spiritual help, they cover themselves by turning to both.

Insight guides: The Bay of Naples (APA Publications; 1992)

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On the morning of 19 September, the day that San Gennaro's blood is due to liquefy, about fifty of the faithful cluster at the massive cathedral doors of the Duomo of Naples. It's seven o'clock and the group is made up of pensioners: husbands and wives, their grey hair slicked neat or in high quiffs. They've come from all over Naples and they clasp their wallets and handbags tightly because there are pickpockets in the growing crowd behind them.

As they wait for the cathedral to open they talk in varying degrees of dialect about how women, on this sacred day, for this most revered ceremony, used to come dressed up in their very best clothes. "Women don't care any more", they complain. "The girls come in jeans. Imagine! Jeans in the presence of a miracle!"

Their conversation moves on to the council's suggested date change for their city's patron saint's day. The council wants to move it from the historic 19 September to the Sunday closest to the date. The date change is part of the Italian government's plan to reduce weekday holidays and increase productivity. There are too many festivals, saints' days and religious celebrations that fall on weekdays and shut shops and offices. "Must we ask San Gennaro to liquefy his blood on a day that suits us? The state dictates to a saint! Ridicolo!" 

There is a newcomer who meekly squeezes closer into the group of old hands. "Excuse me, but what time does the miracle happen?" The regulars look at her patiently, if a little warily. "Signora, it's a miracle. It doesn't have a schedule. It happens when San Gennaro is good and ready and if we deserve it."

"Eh!" she says and steps back into her place. "Of course, of course." 

Over the droning hum of the Mobile Blood Donation generators (this is, after all, a celebration of blood) they discuss how the Napoli soccer team won against Milan last night. It was a crushing 3- 1 victory and these devout native Neapolitans are convinced their soccer team's win was a sign. "I think it augurs well. I think the miracle will happen >>> 

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quickly. Don't you?" They all nod in earnest agreement. They're referring to the times when the liquefaction has taken hours or even days. A soccer victory is an excellent omen. It could point to a quick, fuss-free miracle, indicating that the coming year for Naples will be a good one.

These discerning witnesses of the event know that a quick liquefaction of San Gennaro's congealed blood means that the saint is pleased with the city and that he wili continue to protect Naples from the eruptions of Vesuvius, fires and earthquakes. San Gennaro will ensure that life, politics and collective luck will be good in Naples. The liquefaction, especially if it happens quickly today, signals a prosperous year. A slow change from solid to liquid blood is a bad omen. If it does not happen at all - if the unthinkable happens and San Gennaro's blood stays firm - it means the saint is not at all happy and calamity is imminent. There is no doubt in their minds that next year's good fortune and prosperity depend on the phenomenon that they have come to witness and pray for today. They will stay and pray all day and all night in the little San Gennaro chapel off the side of the Duomo until the phenomenon occurs.

When the cathedral's doors swing open, the talkative group of senior citizens surge forward to secure the best views in the front pews. They push and shove with nimble, shocking desperation and spectacularly sharp elbow jabs.

Inside the church begins to fill up with Neapolitans of all ages. American, Cerman, Armenian and French tourists also find pews. young mothers (in jeans) take their seats and position their strollers. Hymns and rosary chants echo throughout the congregation. Young men dilly-dally as they decide which seat offers the best view. At least three confessionals are in operation and the queues to confess are long. A stage area for the media has been erected to one side of the altar. Like television crews and paparazzi at a Hollywood movie premiere, they jostle each other's tripods and train long black lenses on the red carpets that line the aisles, nave and >>> 

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apse. Against a background of rising mass communal prayer, a full brass band and two dozen female choristers strike up more strident hymns.

By nine in the morning there are about 4000 people in the Naples Duomo praying quietly for San Gennaro's blood to liquefy. The anticipation is palpable as the city's dignitaries and officials finally file in after a procession up the street. This is an occasion where church and state are knitted together, linked by a marvel that first happened in 1389. The city outside awaits the church's word.

The congregation breaks into rapturous applause when finally the cardinal arrives with the precious blood in a round container that looks like a small glass tambourine. He is holding it by a long handle that is attached to a cord around his neck - a safeguard against, God forbid, dropping it. The cardinal is clearly feeling the pressure. Steady drops of sweat drip down his forehead and hang precariously off his nose.

By the time he reaches the altar the congregation's claps and handkerchief waves are excited, though tense. When he turns to lace his flock he lifts one arm for silence, his smile radiant.

"Not only has San Gennaro's blood liquefied, it had already liquefied when I removed it from its sacred container." The cardinal's voice catches with emotion. "So we know for sure, we are certain now. San Gennaro really loves us."
 

The crowd is ecstatic. Raw gratitude flows. Men cry openly. Women sob and fall to their knees. A man faints and has to be helped to his feet by his joyous companions. He is giddy with euphoria. The bells peal outside to announce to the city that the miracle has occurred. Like shots from a machine gun, firecrackers explode on the footpath.

A woman nearby lifts her palms high and murmurs her thanks in fervent prayer, "You heard me during the night. You will take care of my family. You will take care of me." 

​Naples A Way of Life - Carla Coulson & Lisa Clifford (Penguin; 2013)

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Gennaro trouble

Vesuvius went quiet after the catastrophe of 79, and the area around it was soon covered again with forest rooted in the mineral richness thrown up by the volcano. People forgot the high, densely covered hill was not a normal hill. It happened over a generation or so. Life resumed and went on as usual for fifteen hundred years.

What terrified everyone in Naples in the middle of the night of December the fifteenth in 1631 was the violent earthquake. It was the shaking that woke them and sent them rushing into the streets. 'When they got outside they 
saw vesuvius and it seemed to be on fire. Giovan Battista Manso, marquis of Villa - an intellectual and reformer, a founding governor of the charity that commissioned Merisi's Seven Works - was in bed in Naples and not inclined to take much notice of his servants' excitement. He eventually got up and went over to his window. He saw, he wrote to a friend in Rome three days later,

a huge and growing fire . . . part of it rising so fast into the sky that it soon reached above the clouds and part of it pouring down the hill in sheets like a river . . . the earth was shaking almost continuously and at times so intensely that the walls seemed to have a quartan fever.


Over the next
days shocked survivors from the country towns around vesuvius started arriving in Naples with burnt clothes and sooty faces, describing their escape from the river of fire pouring down the slopes and seeming to pursue them, choking on the thick smoke as burning rocks and ash rained down. Over three thousand others had died.


Naples was
out of range of the burning rocks and the river of fire, but panic grew as a dense black cloud drifted toward the city, occasionally flashing fire. By Wednesday morning it had blocked out the sun altogether.


People went through the streets shouting and weeping, or stood in the piazzas not feeling the cold of night or winter or the freezing tramontana that was blowing, so they wouldn't be crushed when their houses collapsed. 


The wind changed and a scirocco brought rain that turned the ashes to mud and made the city streets impassable. The mud increased the horror and prevented the terrified people from taking shelter or preparing to meet the disaster at hand. In this moment of terror the cardinal archbishop of Naples had a brilliant idea.
To take San Cennaro's head and blood in procession outside the city's eastern gate, toward Vesuvius' and wave them in the direction of the impending disaster. The effect of Gennaro's relics was miraculous. Manso reported that

as the holy relics were taken out of the cathedral the rain stopped completely . . . the people in the piazza clearly saw the glorious San Gennaro himself in his bishop's robes appear at the great window over the cathedral door, bless the people and then disappear. I didn't see him myself because as I said I was with the cardinal inside the doorway.


When the miraculous blood  re-entered Naples on its way back through the Porta Capuana, the wind changed and people saw the fatal black cloud drift away from the city. Gennaro had saved Naples. His stocks peaked.


There are no fourth century records of an historical Gennaro. His life story was written several hundred years later and it described him as the young Christian bishop of Benevento, the hill city inland from Naples, during Diocletian's campaign of repression against the Christian movement. Visiting a fellow activist in prison in Pozzuoli in 305. Gennaro was himself arrested. He was sentenced, along with several others, to be torn to pieces by bears in the local 
amphitheatre. The governor being away on business, the sentence became a more perfunctory beheading, carried out near the sulphur pit outside Pozzuoli.
​

Gennaro was buried outside Naples and a hundred years later his remains, apart frorn his head and a couple of phials of blood, were moved to the paleo-Christian catacombs under the Capodimonte hill above the city. They were later srolen from the caves by the Lombard rulers of Benevento and eventually moved again to a monastery and ultimately lost from view. They were rediscovered by chance during some monastic renovations in 1480, in a lead-sealed marble urn with Gennaro's name on it. They were in Naples by 1497, in a crypt under the cathedral's altar. Gennaro's head and the phials of his blood, gathered up at the execurion scene in Pozzuoli, had been in Naples all along. In 1389, over a thousand years after his beheading, Gennaro's coagulated blood had suddenly liquefied, and belore long it was melting regularly twice a year.

Gennaro's blood now gained serious influence among the people in Naples. New practices in astrological prediction and magic divination grew up around its liquefaction. It was a process like the one which had grown up earlier around Virgil and his magic book. People in Naples could do without bread, or a house, or their health, but never without foretelling the 
future. Gennaro suited the times better than Virgil. Neapolitans understood a young man in trouble and they understood decapitation. Their relations with Gennaro became intimate, fraught, sometimes brutal and almost carnal. The church hierarchy hoped Gennaro's dried blood and the fixed cycle of its meltings might bring paganism under control and help the curia get a handle on proliferating magic practices. Neapolitans practised magic a lot, especially for sex, as Bruno knew very well and showed in Candleman.

Gennaro had already received a boost thirty years after his body rejoined his head. In 1527 he intervened decisively to end an epidemic brought on by French and Spanish fighting in the South. The Neapolitans promised Gennaro in return to build a splendid new chapel to house his relics. This took some organizing. The ecclesiastical machine considered Gennaro the church of Naples's gift to the universal counter-reformation... for the miracle
 of the blood, proof of divinity, but Naples wasn't having the church in control of Gennaro. The Deputation of the Treasure - the treasure being Gennaro's mortal remains and not the massive gold and silver objects that contained them, or the works of art that would surround them - was a lay body. In 1608 work began on the monumental new purpose- built chapel to house Gennaro's remains. It was the size of a substantial church, added on to the side of the cathedral. It took nearly thirty years to build and another ten were needed to finish the basic decoration. Building and painting were at their busiest when Vesuvius erupted, Gennaro saved Naples and Gennaromania reached a frenzy. Who was going to paint the Chapel of the Treasure? 

Street Fight in Naples - Peter Robb (pp 218 - 222; Allen & Unwin; 2011)

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San Gennaro: un mistero che divide da sempre fede e scienza

Dal 1389 il miracolo della liquefazione del sangue del santo si ripete tre volte all'anno. Se la scienza avanza dei dubbi, i napoletani non ne hanno affatto: sono convintissimi che tutto qui dipenda da lui. Dal Vesuvio ai gol allo stadio

di Clara Svanera


Napoli e san Gennaro sono un binomio indossulibile. Il santo non è solo il patrono della città, ma ne muove le fila, secondo la credenza popolare. Il miracolo dello scioglimento del sangue infatti è portatore di buon auspicio: un annata positiva nel raccolto, la visita di un personaggio importante, un successo calcistico allo stadio san Paolo sono merito di san Gennaro. Al contrario, un evento negativo, I'aumento della disoccupazione o addirittura una catastrofe naturale si additano come conseguenza del mancato miracolo del santo protettore. Qualche volta, per quanto raramente, è capitato anche che il sangue non si sia liquefatto. Per esempio, nel maggio 1973, quando Napoli fu colpita da un'epidemia di colera, e nel settembre 1980, due mesi prima del terremoto dell' Irpinia.

Il più seguito? Il 19 settembre

Tre sono i miracoli che san Gennaro compie ogni anno in tre momenti distinti e ricorrenti. Il prossimo in calendario è alla vigilia della prima domenica di maggio, che quest'anno cadrà sabato 2, o negli otto giorni successivi, in coincidenza con l'anniversario della traslazione delle reliquie del santo da Benevento, dove morì nel 305 d.C., a Napoli. Il più seguito dei miracoli, però, è quello del 19 settembre, anniversario del martirio
e festa patronale della città, mentre l'ultimo si compie il 16 dicembre, data dell'eruzione del Vesuvio nel 1631. I tre miracoli consistono nella liquefazione del sangue del santo, conservato in due ampolle di vetro, delle quali una è piena per tre quarti e l'altra semivuota (pare che re Carlo III di Borbone, vissuto nel XVIII secolo, ne abbia portato il resto in Spagna). Le ampolle contenenti il sangue di san Gennaro, assieme ad altre sue reliquie, sono conservate in una teca della cattedrale di Napoli e sono oggetto di profonda venerazione. Tecnicamente il miracolo si compie quando il sangue, che di solito si presenta raccolto in grumi si scioglie e assume un colore rosso vivo. La folla invoca il santo affinché compia il miracolo, mentre il cardinale Crescenzio Sepe agita più volte le due ampolle. Non conta solo che il miracolo della liquefazione si compia, ma anche in quanto tempo ciò avvenga. Un tempo troppo lungo fa presagire avvenimenti sfavorevoli o addirittura catastrofici.

Benvoluto anche dai pagani

Si dice che Gennaro fosse nativo di Napoli anche se alcuni sostengono che venisse da Ioppolo, localiti calabrese in provincia di Vibo Valentia. A Napoli comunque visse fino al momento in cui fu eletto vescovo a Benevento. Qui fu benvoluto, ma quando l'imperatore Diocleziano >>>

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firmò tre editti contro i cristiani che portarono a brutali persecuzioni, il vento cambiò. Fu allora che andò a Pozzuoli per portare conforto al diacono Sossio, incarcerato per avere rifiutato i riti pagani e officiato le funzioni religiose nonostante il divieto,
e in quella circostanza venne arrestato fu arrestato per aver rifiutato di abiurare Ia fede in Cristo e condannato a morte. Fu decapitato il 19 settembre 305 presso il Foro di Vulcano, alla Solfatara di Pozzuoli. Qui una certa Eusebia riempi due ampolle con il suo sangue, mentre le spoglie furono seppellite nell'Agro Marciano. Nel 431, le reliquie furono trasportate alle catacombe di Capodimonte e il san
gue consegnato aI vescovo di Napoli. L'intera città gli divenne subito devota anche se non era ancora stato proclamato santo. ciò avvenne nel 1586 sotto papa Sisto V. Nel 472 i fedeli chiesero l'intercessione di Gennaro per ferma.re un'eruzione del Vesuvio in corso e pare che la preghiera sia stata accolta in quella data e in un evento del 512. Nel VI secolo fu costruita una chiesa in suo onore a Napoli, dove furono deposte le reliquie e il sangue e sulle cui fondamenta nel XIII secolo sorse il Duomo. Una parte di ossa fu poi trafugata e portata a Benevento, ma nel 1492 tutte le reliquie furono ricomposte nella cattedrale napoletana. Le due ampolle sono custodite in una nicchia con porte d'argento, nella Cappella del tesoro. Dal primo prodigio certificato del 17 agosto 1389, i miracoli si ripetono a cadenza regolare.

Che cosa dice la scienza

La liquefazione del sangue è stata oggetto di numerosi studi. Il più grande degli ostacoli riscontrati dagli scienziati che nei secoli si sono avvicendati per dare una risposta scientifica a un fenomeno apparentemente inspiegabile, è il fatto che le ampolle siano ermeticamente sigillate e quindi non sia mai stato possibile eseguire un vero test di laboratorio. Dal XIX secolo tra gli studiosi di scienze occulte si è fatta strada l'ipotesi che si trattasse in realtà >>> 


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di una sostanza tissotropica, e cioè capace di passare dallo stato solido a quello liquido e viceversa, solo sotto sollecitazioni fisiche o grazie a una fonte di calore. Una proprietà che il sangue non ha. In particolare si avanzava l' ipotesi che nelle ampolle ci fosse un gel a base di carbonato di calcio, sale da cucina e cloruro ferrico (presente in minerale vulcanico, la molisite), elementi di facile reperibilità già nel Medioevo, che avrebbero potuto essere mescolate ad arte da un alchimista dell'epoca. Le manipolazioni delle ampolle da parte del vescovo in attesa del miracolo potrebbero, secondo alcuni studiosi, giustificare la Iiquefazione. Tuttavia, I'esame spettroscopico, il solo possibile, condotto da un ricercatore di medicina dell'Università di Torino, ha confermato nel 1980 la presenza di emoglobina. Il fisico francese Michel Mitov, invece, nel suo libro Materia sensibile - Schiume, gel, cristalli liquidi e altri miracoli (Harvard University Press, 2012), ipotizza che il Iiquido, di natura tissotropica, contenga spermaceti, grasso estratto dai capodogli, e soluzione argillosa, dove è presente I'ossido ferrico. Il colore sarebbe conforme a quello del sangue e il fatto che ci sia dell'ossido ferrico potrebbe giustificare anche la presunta presenza di emoglobina. Il dubbio rimane.

A conforto della tesi miracolosa c'è da aggiungere anche un'altra coincidenza: non soltanto il sangue si liquefa, ma contemporaneamente al miracolo di Napoli, a Pozzuoli, la pietra conservata nella chiesa che si ritiene sorga nel punto esatto dove il santo è stato decapitato, diventa rosso sangue. 

Dalla viva voce del cardinale

Il prodigio della liquefazione significa che il santo vuole bene a Napoli: << È segno della sua bontà e della sua misericordia e che san Gennaro è ancora vivo nel suo sangue e continua a proteggere Napoli e ascoltare le sue preghiere >>, dice il cardinale Sepe. Nessuna prova scientifica potrà mai distruggere una fede così forte. 

Tutta la città in 
prccessione 

La processione della vigilia della prima domenica di maggio, che quest'anno cadrà sabato 2, e chiamata "processione delle statue" e si snoda nel centro storico partenopeo. Il busto del santo, assieme alla teca con il sangue, parte dal Duomo e attraversando San Biagio dei Librai e Spaccanapoli, arriva alla basilica di santa Chiara. Questa processione è conosciuta anche come "processione degli infrascati", per la consuetudine del clero di mettere sul capo corone di fiori per proteggersi dal sole. Esse vengono ricordate con una corona d'argento sul trono dove è collocata la teca contenente il sangue del santo. 

Gi sono anche san Luigi e santa Patrizia 

San Gennaro non è il solo santo a Napoli il cui sangue si scioglie. In questa città si contano diverse ampolle sacre che contengono il sangue di santi, oggetto di prodigi. Nella Chiesa del Gesù Vecchio, per esempio, si conserva quello di san Luigi Gonzaga che si scioglie il 21 giugno, ricorrenza della sua morte avvenuta nel 1591. C'è poi san Giovanni Battista, il cui sangue, coagulato tutto l'anno, si liquefa il 29 agosto, giorno del suo martirio nel I secolo d.C. E ancora il sangue di san Lorenzo, che pure si scioglie ogni anno, il 10 agosto. lnfine c'è santa Patrizia, originaria di Bisanzio, protettrice delle partorienti. Le sue spoglie sono nel monastero di San Gregorio Armeno, in un'urna d'oro e d'argento, ornata di gemme. Il prodigio dello scioglimento del suo sangue va avanti da 1200 anni.

"Santi" numeri da giocare

La smorfia napoletana, cioè l'elenco dei numeri del Lotto (una serie che va da 1 a 90),
ognuno dei quali ha un significato e viene spesso associato all'interpretazione di un sogno, è uno dei cardini della superstizione locale. E naturalmente anche a san Gennaro ne sono associati alcuni, sistematicamente giocati in occasione dei prodigi del santo. San Gennaro acquista così un valore quasi esoterico e anche a seconda dell'esito dei suoi miracoli, sono puntate cifre e giocati numeri diversi. Quelli più frequentemente legati a lui sono: 9, 15, 18, 53, 55.

Airone, Aprile 2015



Addio Pino! Farewell Pino!

4/1/2015

 
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Si è spento stamattina, a soli 59 anni, Pino Daniele, il celebre cantante, cantautore, e musicista napoletano che è stato uno dei più grandi protagonisti della musica italiana fin dal 1977, anno in cui incise il suo primo straordinario album Terra mia, e diede il via a quella fusione di tradizione napoletana, blues, rock, jazz, e ritmi sudamericani che, combinata ad una vocalità unica, lo ha reso inconfondibile. Inutile dire che Pino rimarrà sempre nei nostri ricordi e nei nostri cuori. Lo ricordiamo con tre canzoni bellissime, tutte risalenti al periodo "napoletano": Donna Cuncetta e Il mare, tratte dall'album omonimo Pino Daniele, del 1979; e Annarè, tratta dall'album del 1982, Bella 'mbriana (la bella 'mbriana, nella credenza popolare napoletana, è lo spirito benefico della casa), che si apre con la straordinaria strofa: E lascia pazzià / pecchè 'e criature songo 'e Dio... (E lasciali giocare / perché i bambini appartengono a Dio...). Le canzoni sono in napoletano e non siamo riusciti a trovare su internet le traduzioni in italiano ma, appena avremo un Napoletano DOC a portata di mano, gliele faremo tradurre. Intanto godetevi le straordinarie note del grandissimo Pino Daniele:  

Pino Daniele, the famous Neapolitan singer, songwriter, and musician, who was one of the great protagonists of the Italian music scene since 1977, year in which he released his first extraordinary album, Terra mia (My homeland), which launched that fusion of Neapolitan musical tradition, blues, rock, jazz, and Latin American rhythms which, combined with a unique voice, made him one of the most original Italian singers, died this morning, at only 59 years of age. It goes without saying that Pino will forever survive in our memories and hearts. We'd like to remember him with three very very beautiful songs, all dating back to his "Neapolitan" period: Donna Cuncetta (Lady Concetta) and Il mare (The Sea), both from his self-titled 1979 album Pino Daniele; and Annarè (Annarella; piccola Anna), from the 1982 album Bella 'mbriana (the bella 'mbriana, in popular Neapolitan culture, is the benevolent Spirit of the home), which opens with the extraordinary verse: E lascia pazzià / pecchè 'e criature songo 'e Dio... (E lasciali giocare / perché i bambini appartengono a Dio...; Let them play / because children belong to God...). The songs are in Neapolitan and we have failed to find the italian translations on the web, however, as soon as we will be within reach of a true blue Neapoltan, we will have him or her translate them for us. Meanwhile enjoy the extraordinary sound of the great Pino Daniele:    



E per chiudere questo articolo del nostro blog che purtroppo è scaturito dalla tristissima ed inaspettata notizia della scomparsa di Pino Daniele, ecco l'omaggio che il programma di Rai1, Canzone, gli ha dedicato proprio pochi giorni fa, il 30 dicembre. Addio Pino!


And to end this blog post which unfortunately has been brought about by the very sad and unexpected news of the passing away of Pino Daniele, here is the homage that the Italian television channel Rai 1 programme, Canzone, dedicated to him only a few days ago, on the 30th of December. Farewell Pino!   

Buon Natale e felice anno nuovo!

18/12/2014

 
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Sarà che la vita sta diventando sempre più frenetica, sarà che stiamo invecchiando, ma l'anno sembra durare sempre di meno e rieccoci improvvisamente, ancora una volta, alle porte del Natale! Ecco, nella foto in alto, il presepe, dell'Alessi, di Italia 500: poca cosa rispetto ai presepi alla cui costruzione, o preparazione, partecipavamo dando una mano a papà o al nonno, facendo razzia di muschio nei dintorni, posizionando e riposizionando statuine, costruendo e dipingendo la casetta per la pescivendola, ma simpatico lo stesso, a cui aggiungiamo ogni anno una statuina o due - quest'anno è toccato a Cappuccetto Rosso e al Lupo, dall'aspetto non tanto cattivo! Per capire un po' come viene celebrato il Natale in Italia eccovi un bel video di Rick Steves; parte di un podcast di Eye on Italy [che potete trovare su iTunes] dedicato al Natale in Italia che include numerosi consigli per coloro che si recheranno a Roma, ed in Italia in genere, durante il periodo natalizio; ed infine, un'intervista del 2008 del simpaticissimo Tony Tardio al simpaticissimo autore di Head Over Heal, Chris Harrison, in cui Chris racconta la sua esperienza del Natale in Italia. In effetti abbiamo pubblicato in basso due versioni dell'intervista a Chris: la prima riporta la parte dell'intervista che tratta prettamente del Natale in Italia; la seconda versione riporta l'intervista per intero in cui, oltre al Natale, Chris parla anche della nascita di sua figlia Sofia, e della persona più temuta al mondo dai mariti italiani: la suocera!





Uscendo fuori tema per qualche minuto, avendo menzionato la suocera, ecco uno spezzone, terribilmente "politically incorrect" ma davvero molto buffo, di un documentario del 1997, The Essential History of Italy, di Richard Denton, in cui il grande Dario Fo parla del rapporto tra le donne e gli uomini italiani:


Tornando al discorso del Natale, vogliamo riprendere alcuni temi legati al Natale in Italia che sono stati menzionati nel video di Rick Steves e nei podcast in alto: le canzoni di Natale (Christmas Carols); i zampognari; il presepe (o presepio); ed infine, il panettone e il pandoro! Cominciamo con le canzoni di Natale. 

Le canzoni di Natale dei paesi anglofoni sono molto popolari anche in Italia - noi da bambini, impazzivamo per Jingle Bells - sia nelle versioni in lingua inglese che in quelle in lingua italiana. Ma c'è una canzone di Natale popolarissima che è prettamente italiana: Tu scendi dalle stelle, di  
Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori, composta nel 1732! Eccone una versione bellissima cantata dal compiantissimo Luciano Pavarotti:

La zampogna è uno strumento a fiato simile ai bagpipes e lo zampognaro è colui che suona la zampogna. Per molti Italiani, il po' stonato (non ce ne vogliano gli amanti della zampogna) ma molto amato suono di questo strumento annuncia l'imminente arrivo del Natale.  Ecco un ottimo articolo tratto da Italy Magazine che ci spiega chi sono gli zampognari:

The Zampognari – Welcome visitors at Christmas

As we approach the Feast of the Immaculate Conception holiday on the 8th of December, when Italy officially gets ready for Christmas, people in many parts of the country will be eagerly awaiting the appearance of the zampognari or bagpipe players. The zampognari were originally shepherds who came down from the hills at Christmas to celebrate with their families and entertain people at various shrines but now they are often men who work in cities but whose families have a zampognaro tradition. The players derive their name from their instrument, the zampogna, which in turn is a corruption of Greek simponia, meaning single reeds. This instrument is a kind of double chantered pipe but some of the zampognari play the piffero - ciaramella or ciaramedda in dialect - a kind of oboe, instead. Each pipe is tuned differently according to the tradition in the area where the players come from. The reeds are traditionally made from the giant reed canna marina although some are made from plastic these days and the bags are traditionally made from goat hide or sheepskin but again, synthetic materials are now often used . The pifferi are made from the wood of olive or plum trees. All zampognari still wear traditional dress. No one is sure about where the zampognari tradition exactly began: some argue for Abruzzo or Molise, others for Rome and still others for Sicily.

The zampogna tune, Quando nascette Ninno [“When the Child Was Born”] is the original version of Italy’s favourite Christmas carol, Tu scendi dalle stelle [“You Come Down from the Stars”]. Of course, the zampognari play many other traditional melodies as well and some of these extol the beauty of Italy’s various regions. The tunes are joyful and make people want to tap their feet or get up and dance. Where will you find the zampognari this Christmas? Although people are worried that the tradition is dying out, it is very much alive in Abruzzo, Molise, Lazio, Sicily, Campania, Basilicata and Calabria. They often appear where there are grottos or at Christmas and open air markets and you will see them in the streets of Rome. Children, in particular, love the zampognari but they make everyone happy by wishing them a Buon Natale and offering them the gift of friendship. And if you want a souvenir, you will often see zampognari figurines in Christmas cribs. Look out for the zampognari
 if you are going to be in Italy between now and Christmas, especially on the 8th of December and on Sundays!
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Ed ecco i due bei zampognari, Alvaro Zampognaro e Gennaro Pifferaro, del nostro presepe:

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E in basso, Tu scendi dalle stelle nella versione degli zampognari:

Per concludere il tema degli zampognari, setacciando YouTube, ci siamo imbattuti in questo documentario bellissimo: Zampogna: The Soul of Southern Italy, di David Marker. Eccolo:



Ed ora, parliamo del presepe, o presepio. Innanzitutto, qual'è la differenza tra presepio e presepe?
Altri si sono posti la stessa domanda ed ecco sia la domanda che la risposta tratto dal sito genio.virgilio.it: 
Domanda: "Presepe" o "presepio": qual è la forma più corretta in italiano? Esistono delle differenze tra i due termini? Mentre stavo preparando il presepe a me e mia sorella è sorto un dubbio: «ma stiamo preparando il presepe o il presepio?». E' una curiosità sulla lingua italiana che ci è venuta in mente poichè io uso la prima forma ed invece lei la seconda ma quale delle due è effettivamente quella corretta? Esiste una differenza tra "presepe" e "presepio"? Oppure è corretto usare entrambe le forme? 

Risposta: Nella lingua italiana usare "presepe" o "presepio" è indifferente. Cercando su alcuni dizionari online ho trovato per esempio che per il Treccani non c'è alcuna differenza e sul Pianigiani è possibile scrivere "presepe" o "presepio" senza alcun errore. Questo è dato dal fatto che in latino sono presenti sia la forma "praesaepium" (neutro di II declinazione), da cui è derivato "presepio", sia la forma "praesaepe" (neutro di III declinazione)", da cui è derivato "presepe", entrambe con il significato di "mangiatoia". […] La cosa importante da ricordare è che per entrambi i termini il plurale è sempre "presepi".

Ma che cos'è il presepe, o presepio? Ecco la definizione del Treccani:
Nell’uso comune, rappresentazione plastica della nascita di Gesù che si fa nelle chiese e nelle case, nelle festività natalizie e dell’Epifania, riproducendo scenicamente, con figure formate di materiali vari e in un ambiente ricostruito più o meno realisticamente (talora anche anacronistico), le scene della Natività e dell’Adorazione dei Magi.
Ed ecco come Martha Baarkerjian ci descrive sia "il presepe" che "il presepe vivente" sul sito goitaly.about.com: 
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Italian Christmas Cribs, Nativity Displays and Presepi in Italy

Traditionally, the main focus of Christmas decorations in Italy is the Nativity scene, 
presepe or presepio in Italian. Every church has a presepe and they can be found in squares, shops, and other public areas. Displays often go beyond the manger scene and may even include a representation of the entire village. Presepi are usually set up starting December 8, the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception, through January 6, Epiphany but some are unveiled on Christmas Eve. Many people set up a Christmas crib in their house and figurines for nativity scenes are made in many parts of Italy, with some of the best coming from Naples and Sicily. Although the presepe is usually set up before Christmas, baby Jesus is added on Christmas Eve. The Nativity scene is said to have originated with St. Francis of Assisi in 1223 when he constructed a nativity scene in a cave in the town of Greccio and held Christmas Eve mass and a nativity pageant there. Greccio reenacts this event each year. Carving figurines for nativity scenes started in the late 13th century when Arnolfo di Cambio was commissioned to carve marble nativity figures for the first Rome Jubilee held in 1300. The nativity can be seen in the museum of Santa Maria Maggiore Church.

Best places to see Chrsitmas Cribs, or Presepi, in Italy

Naples is the best city to visit for their presepi. Hundreds of nativity scenes are erected throughout the city. Some creches are very elaborate and may be handmade or use antique figures. Starting December 8, the Church of Gesu' Nuovo, in Piazza del Gesu', displays nativity scene art work from the Neapolitan Nativity Scenes Association. The street Via San Gregorio Armeno in central Naples is filled with displays and stalls selling Nativity scenes all year. 

Vatican City erects a huge presepe in St. Peter's Square for Christmas and is usually unveiled on Christmas Eve. A Christmas Eve mass is held in St. Peter's square, usually at 10 pm. 

In Rome some of the biggest and most elaborate presepi are found in Piazza del Popolo, Piazza Euclide, Santa Maria in Trastevere, and Santa Maria d'Aracoeli, on the Capitoline Hill. A life-size nativity scene is set up in Piazza Navona where a Christmas marketplace is also set up. The Church of Saints Cosma e Damiano, by the main entrance to the Roman Forum, has a large nativity scene from Naples on display all year.

Bethlehem in the Grotto - an elaborate lifesize nativity scene is created each year and transported to a beautiful grotto in the Abruzzo commune of Stiffe, about 20 miles from L'Aquila. The scene is illuminated and can be visited during December.

Verona has an international display of nativities in the Arena through January.

Trento in northern Italy's Alto-Adige region has a large nativity scene in Piazza Duomo.

Jesolo, 30 km from Venice, has a sand sculpture nativity made by top international sand sculpture artists. It takes place daily in Piazza Marconi through mid-January. Donations are used to fund charitable projects.

Manarola in Cinque Terre has a unique ecological nativity powered by solar energy.

Celleno, a tiny town in the northern Lazio region about 30 km from Viterbo, has a magnificent presepe that is set up for viewing all year. Celleno is also famous for its cherries.

Many churches in Milan have elaborate nativity scenes set up around Christmas time.

Presepio Museums in Italy

Il Museo Nazionale di San Martino in 
Naples has an elaborate collection of nativity scenes from the 1800s.

Il Museo Tipologico Nazionale del Presepio, under the church of Saints Quirico e Giulitta in Rome, has over 3000 figurines from all over the world made out of almost anything you can imagine. The museum has very limited hours and is closed in summer but they are open each afternoon December 24-January 6. In October they have a course where you can learn to make presepe yourself.

Il Museo Tipologico del Presepio in Macerata in the Marche region has more than 4000 nativity pieces and a 17th century presepe from Naples.

Presepi Viventi, Italian Living Nativity Scenes


Living nativity pageants, presepi viventi, are found in many parts of Italy with costumed people acting out the parts of the nativity. Often living nativity scenes are presented for several days, usually Christmas Day and December 26, and sometimes again the following weekend around the time of Epiphany, January 6, the 12th day of Christmas when the three Wise Men gave Baby Jesus their gifts.


Top places to see living nativity scenes, presepi viventi, in Italy


Frasassi Gorge has one of the largest and most suggestive nativity pageants in Italy. Held on a cliff near the Frasassi Caves, the Genga Nativity Scene includes a procession up the hill to a temple and scenes from everyday life during the time of Jesus' birth. More than 300 actors take part and proceeds are given to charity. Usually held on December 26 and 30.

Barga, a beautiful medieval hill town in northern Tuscany, has a living nativity and Christmas pagaent on December 23.

Chia, near Soriano (see Northern Lazio Map), holds a large living nativity on December 26 with more than 500 participants. There's also one nearby in Bassano.

Custonaci, a small town near Trapani in Sicily, has a beautiful nativity scene re-enacted inside a cave. A tiny town was buried in the cave by a landslide in the 1800's. The cave has been excavated and now serves as a setting for the interesting live nativity events December 25-26 and early January. More than just a nativity, the village is set up to resemble an ancient village with craftspeople and small shops.


Equi Terme, in the 
Lunigiana region of Tuscany, has a reenactment of the nativity that takes place throughout the village in a beautiful hillside setting.

Vetralla, in the northern Lazio region, has the oldest living nativity in the region.

Rivisondoli, in the Abruzzo region (Abruzzo map), has a reenactment of the arrival of the 3 kings on January 5 with hundreds of costumed participants. Rivisondoli also presents a living nativity December 24 and 25.

L'Aquila and Scanno also in the Abruzzo region have living nativities on Christmas Day as do many other small villages in the region.

Liguria has living nativity scenes in the towns of Calizzano, Roccavignale, and Diano Arentino during December.

Milan has an Epiphany Parade of the Three Kings from the Duomo to the church of Sant'Eustorgio, January 6.


Il presepe si prepara dappertutto in Italia ma la città maggiormente associata alla tradizione presepiale è Napoli grazie all'altissima qualità artistica, e al realismo straordinario, raggiunto dai presepisti napoletani tra '600 e il '700. Infatti, durante questo periodo, alla rappresentazione della natività vennero progressivamente aggiunti luoghi e personaggi tratti dalla quotidianità, dalle strade e dalle piazze della città, dagli strati più umili della popolazione, come osti, calzolai, tavernari, vagabondi, nani, resti dei templi greci e romani della zona napoletana, e cibi di ogni specie: carni in quasi ogni taglio immaginabile, salsicce, banchi pieni di pesce, cesti di frutta, formaggi; insomma tutti gli alimenti sognati da popolino. Inoltre, nel Settecento il presepe uscì dalle chiese ed entrò per la prima volta nelle case dell'aristocrazia e del ceto medio più ricco, dando vita ad una vera e propria competizione per avere il presepe più bello e scenografico, al quale lavorarono spesso grandi artisti e scultori. Vi raccomandiamo d leggere l'articolo di wikipedia dedicato al Presepe napoletano che è davvero ottimo. Ecco in basso un brano tratto dal libro di Harold Acton, The Bourbons of Naples, del 1957, che ci presenta il personaggio singolare di padre Rocco e spiega per quale motivo il presepe divenne così popolare nella Napoli del '700 (il ritratto in basso, dal naso inconfondibile ereditato dalla mamma, Elisabetta Farnese, è di Carlo di Borbone, re di Napoli dal 1735 al 1759):   

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King Charles's passion for building was not consummated with Caserta. He also wished to build a colossal palace for he poor, and Ferdinando Fuga was commissioned to start work on the Reale Albergo dei Poveri in 1751. The actual building, of which the front is 354 metres long, only represents half the original project, as the work on it was interrupted periodically until 1829. Here vagabonds and helpless orphans, the unemployed and unemployable, were to be housed, fed, educated and, if possible, converted into useful citizens. 

The foundation of this enormous hospice was partly inspired by the Dominican Father Rocco, the popular preacher and 'city missionary', one of the most curious Neapolitan characters of the eighteenth century. Born in 1700, he died in 1782; and he spent his long dedicated life among the populace, fulminating against vice, settling petty lawsuits, beating the quarrelsome into peace and fighting sinners with a stout stick or with a heavy crucifix he carried in his belt when his floods of eloquence failed. The lazzaroni responded to one who could express himself masterfully in their language, who could thrill their impressionable minds with the images of his own religious ardour, who fearlessly thrust his way into their lowest haunts, startling the taverns and brothels with apocalyptic visions of woe. 'Now then,' he shouted, 'I want a sign of your repentance and good intentions. Those who are well determined lift your arms!' Every arm was duly raised, and Father Rocco remained silent. After gazing long and expressively, first at the crucifix, then at the image of the Madonna before him, he exclaimed: 'Oh my God! would that I now had a sabre to cut off those hands which have offended you with forgery, with usury, with thievery, with homicides, and with sins of the flesh, so that they may no longer commit these evil actions!' And immediately every hand went down and hid itself, and there was a general outburst of sobbing. Tanucci joked with Galiani about the effect of these sermons, 'which made those rabid propagators of the species laugh and set to work more merrily than before'. Father Rocco was a valuable intermediary between the King and the populace and vice versa. 'The court understands his importance,' wrote Swinburne, 'and has often experienced the good effects of his mediation; though of late years an attention to the plentiful supply of cheap provisions, and a strong garrison, have kept the populace quiet, to a degree unknown in former times, yet particular circumstances may yet render a Neapolitan mob formidable to government. During a late eruption of Vesuvius, the people took offence at the new theatre being more frequented than the churches, and assembled in great numbers to drive the nobility from the opera; they snatched the flambeaux from the footmen, and were proceeding tumultuously to the cathedral to fetch the head of San Gennaro, and oppose its miraculous influence to the threats of the blazing volcano: this would undoubtedly have ended in a very serious sedition if Father Rocco had not stepped forth, and after reproaching them bitterly with the affront they were about to put upon the saint by attending his relics with torches taken from mercenary hands, ordered them all to go home and provide themselves with wax tapers; the crowd dispersed, and proper" measures were taken to prevent its gathering again.' 

Father Rocco's influence on Charles, and later on his son, led to the foundation of many charitable institutions, of which the Albergo dei Poveri is the most striking. Naples was also indebted to him for the first experiment in lighting the streets. All previous attempts had failed when he suggested setting up holy shrines at every convenient corner, beginning with the darkest and most dangerous; and he soon roused a general competition for supplying the lamps before these shrines with oil. They are kept burning to this day in many a sombre alley, and until 1806 they provided the city's only regular illumination. Father Rocco began a vigorous campaign against gambling, which had become a general epidemic. To persuade the King to support it, he is said to have compiled a list of the noble families ruined by this vice, so that Charles exclaimed in horror: 'Father Rocco, I do not wish to be a king of beggars ! - hence the decree against gambling of November 24, 1753. 


Nowhere else has the pious custom of the presepe, or Christmas crib, assumed so many delightful forms, and Father Rocco did much to popularize it. He wished to bring the Mystery of the Nativity to the people and make them visualize it. Half his cell was filled with a presepe  which he constantly improved with additional figures and effective details. The figures were usually about six inches high carved in sycamore wood. Before Christmas he bustled about the shops of sculptors and artisans, such as still exist in the Vico dei Figurari, to criticize and encourage their work. A realist himself, he persuaded them to avoid the rococo mannerisms of the sculptors then in vogue. He set up a Nativity scene in a grotto near Capodimonte, which the King often stopped to admire on his way to the hunt. 

Charles himself designed and modelled the settings for the Christmas crib in the royal palace, dabbling in clay and cutting up cork for the manger, while the Queen and Princesses sewed and embroidered costumes for the figures, each according to scale. The aristocracy and wealthy merchants followed the King's example, so that the presepe increased in gorgeousness and variety, and this was the period of its highest artistic development. 

The most elaborate consisted of three scenes, the Annunciation, the Nativity and the Tavern (or divmarium); occasionally the Massacre of the Innocents was added. The skyborne angel waking the shepherds was more or less conventional, but fancy ran riot in the Tavern scene, where peasants were gathered in cheerful gossip or sang to the guitar, while a rubicund innkeeper prepared a feast to satisfy the most ravenous appetite. Palestine was conceived in terms of the Neapolitan landscape; often Vesuvius erupted boisterously in the background. Hundreds of figures were scattered across the scene; except for the Blessed Virgin, Saint Joseph and the angels, who wore the traditional robes, all were clad in contemporary costume. The Magi wore long cloaks like the knights of San Gennaro. Their retinue were decked in the trappings of Africa and Asia; Mongols and Kaffirs mingled with Circassians and Hindoos; pages, cup-bearers, grooms, guards, slaves were loaded with precious caskets, besides the gold and frankincense and myrrh. The peasants and shepherds wore the festive apparel of Ischia, Procida and other parts of the Two Sicilies. Some were portraits of well-known personalities like Father Rocco; occasionally Pulcinella and characters from the Commedia dell' Arte were introduced. Such famous sculptors as Sammartino, Celebrano and the Bottiglieri brothers devoted much time and skill to this form of art. Some specialized in domestic animals; others in fish, fruit, vegetables and groceries. Exuberance and profusion flourish; most of these tableaux interpret the jovial, sensuous, expansive aspects of the Neapolitan temperament. The artisans shared the faith of the simple shepherds. 

The King was at one with his people in exalting the family cult by this outward symbol of the sacred mystery. As long as the Bourbon dynasty ruled Naples, the presepe was the centre of Christmas rejoicings. The whole Court accompanied the King and Queen from church to church to visit the Nativity scenes which were their special pride. Soft organ music and the light of candles helped to foster the illusion of reality. The crib in the Jesuit Church of Gesu Nuovo always attracted a large crowd, as its Babe was said to have spoken to a Moorish slave and converted him. A hymn commemorated the miracle: 'The Infant Jesus in the manger speaketh to a slave.' Outside in the streets, Calabrian bagpipers, like the Biblical shepherds, wailed poignant melodies. In private houses the Babe was usually removed from the manger before Christmas Eve. Then a party would be given, enlivened with music and impromptu poems until midnight, when a priest recited prayers, after which the Babe was consigned to the youngest girl in the family, who restored it to the crib. 

'In many houses a room, in some a whole suite of apartments, in others a terrace upon the house-top, is dedicated to this very uncommon show,' wrote Mrs Piozzi. 'One wonders, and cries out it is certainly but a baby-house at best; yet, managed by people whose heads, naturally turned towards architecture and design, give them power thus to defy a traveller not to feel delighted with the general effect; while if every single figure is not capitally executed and nicely expressed beside, the proprietor is truly miserable, and will cut a new cow, or vary the horse's attitude, against next Christmas, coûte que 
coûte [cost what it may]. And perhaps I should not have said so much about the matter if there had not been shown me within this last week presepios which have cost their possessors fifteen hundred or two thousand English pounds; and rather than relinquish or sell them, many families have gone to ruin. I have wrote the sums down in letters not figures, for fear of the possibility of a mistake. One of these playthings had the journey of the three kings represented in it, and the presents were all of real gold and silver finely worked; nothing could be better or more livelily finished. '"But, sir," said I, "why do you dress up one of the wise men with a turban and crescent, six hundred years before the birth of Mahomet, who first put that mark in the forehead of his followers? The eastern magi were not Turks; this is a breach of costume." My gentleman paused, and thanked me; said he would inquire if there was nothing heretical in the objection; and if all was right, it should be changed next year without fail.' 

Charles became so addicted to this Neapolitan custom that he introduced it into Spain, whence he continued to order figures of shepherds and other Nativity properties from Naples.

Ancora due "fuori tema". Si dà il caso che alla Art Gallery of Victoria, a Melbourne, è esposto un ritratto, recentemente acquistato dalla Galleria, dipinto da Anton Raphael Mengs, del 1774 circa, che raffigura Luigi Antonio, il fratello più giovane di Carlo re di Napoli, il cui naso è identico a quello del fratello, anzi, sembrano gemelli!

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L'altro "fuori tema" è un piccolo approfondimento a proposito del sistema d'illuminazione stradale introdotto a Napoli grazie a padre Rocco, tratto da un interessante articolo in rete, Le origini dell’illuminazione pubblica in Italia. In basso troverete anche l'immagine che accompagna la parte dell'articolo dedicato a padre Rocco, che raffigura una delle edicole illuminate volute da padre Rocco, ed è assolutamente affascinante: notate gli ex voto anatomici a sinistra!  

Provvedimenti ancora più solleciti si registrano a Napoli dove fin dal 1770 il governo ordina che tutti gli edifici pubblici, i Banchi, i palazzi dei ministri, degli ambasciatori e dei nobili di grande casato, tengano fanali accesi di notte davanti alle porte e agli angoli delle strade; in seguito ne viene collocato un centinaio lungo la strada di Forcella. Ma si tratta di un’illuminazione di breve durata in quanto le luci vengono presto abbattute da malviventi che necessitano del buio per poter svolgere le loro illecite attività. Per ovviare a questo grave inconveniente si racconta che padre Gregorio Maria Rocco (1700-1782), ottenuta la licenza dal re, inizia a disporre nei punti più trafficati, e in apposite nicchie, 300 copie di un quadro raffigurante la Vergine e 100 figure del Cristo montate su altrettante croci di legno: da quel giorno si registra una vera e propria gara da parte dei fedeli per mantenere continuamente accesi, sia di giorno che di notte, due fanali ai lati di ciascuna raffigurazione sacra. Con questo espediente Napoli riesce finalmente ad essere illuminata, persino nei vicoli in precedenza troppo bui e pericolosi.

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Tornando al discorso del presepe, in particolare quello napoletano, ecco due video: il primo, bellissimo, è del Carnegie Museum of Art, che ogni anno, durante il periodo natalizio, allestisce il presepe napoletano facente parte della collezione del museo; il secondo è dedicata a una mostra di presepi napoletani tenuta a New York, nel 2008 - molti belli gli interventi dei due "Mastri presepai" a partire da 2 minuti e 30 secondi del filmato:



Tappa obbligatoria per chi si reca a Napoli è la visita a via San Gregorio Armeno, la celebre strada degli artigiani del presepe, dove troverete, oltre alle statuine classiche, anche quelle di personaggi famosi della politica, dello spettacolo, della televisione, dello sport, della cultura, o che hanno fatto notizia. In basso, vi proponiamo tre video che ci portano alla scoperta di questa strada molto suggestiva e, nel terzo video, vedrete, tra le tante statuine, quelle davvero bruttine della povera Kate Middleton, e dei poveri George e Amal!: 




Gli australiani, per usare le definizioni dello scrittore Luciano De Crescenzo, sono sempre stati "alberisti" piuttosto che "presepisti", quindi siamo rimasti di stucco stamattina quando abbiamo visto l'articolo dedicato al presepe ne The Australian. Eccolo:

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Making a scene with presepio nativity figures
  • THE AUSTRALIAN, DECEMBER 20, 2014
  • Last year our stolid Canberra crescent of solid brick-houses from the 1960s became home to an architecture award-winning new house that changes colour as you walk past and has a pool on the front deck. To say it’s cutting edge as it changes from a deep pink to purple is clearly understatement.
  • It also has a huge glass foyer that would do a middle office tower in Manhattan proud to offset the transplanted mature weeping cherries and camellias in the front yard. For all these modern touches it was doubly, no triply, surprising to walk past at the beginning of December and see an almost life-size nativity scene — Mary, Jesus and Joseph and the three kings — nestling happily in front of the water feature in the foyer.

  • It was a clash or meeting of the 21st and 13th centuries, a meeting all the more remarkable for me to consider that one more Italian tradition is moving into modern Australia. For years now Christmas in Australia has included a flood of Italian treats, led by the now ubiquitous panet­tone, into delis, department stores and gourmet shops.

    The appeal to non-Italian markets has gone so far that panettone tins, once reserved only for ancient recipes and the baking family’s lineage, now feature Santas and American-style Christmas scenes. Was I witnessing the migration of Italy’s great Christmas tree alternative — the presepio — to Australia and how was it happening?

    The presepio, or nativity or crib scene, in Italy is far more than a little plastic scene depicting Jesus in the manger, perhaps with a wise man or three.

    The presepio is an 800-year-old tradition including a sweep from high art to church devotions and down to the most humble family presentation that was once the universal Christmas display devoid of wasteful and space-consuming trees.

    While the holy family of Mary, Jesus and Joseph is the centre of the prespio, some have become so grand and huge that they cover galleries of activity depicting whole villages or huge tracts of countryside. Putting out the presepio, without the baby Jesus until Christmas Eve of course, is as big a deal in Italy as the arrival of the Christmas tree in Australia.

    Being an Aussie-Italo family we do both on the same day and lay out a collection of  scores of figures depicting an Italian village surrounded by Abruzzi shepherds with their traditional bagpipes. (They traditionally came to play in the streets of Rome when high mountains of Abruzzo were covered with snow at Christmas.)
  • It was St Francis of Assisi who started the presipio in 1223 in the village of Greccio using real people, real animals and a real grotto to encourage devotion to the birth of Christ. By 1300 there began to be marble depictions of the scene of the birth of Christ with a donkey and ox present accompanied by a few shepherds and, later, the three wise men. Presepi became art forms, particularly in Naples and Sicily, and live portrayals as well as large representations in churches spread through Italy.

    King Charles III of Naples commissioned a huge presipio from the greatest artists of the day and now, all through the year, the church of Cosma and Damiano, on the edge of the Forum in Rome, displays such a scene so large it is difficult to find Jesus in the crib because of the various depictions of village life, from trades to cooking, that surround them.

    But it is the family presepio that takes pride of place in Italian hearts. Philosopher and writer Umberto Eco has written lovingly of his family’s presepio and how his father would gradually move the three kings through their house from December 8, the traditional day for the presepio to go up, until January 6, the feast of the Ephinany when the kings arrive with their gifts, when they arrived on the sideboard.

    Laura Bush caused a stir when she was in the White House by installing a presepio that had been a gift to the White House from Naples, but most modern Italian families can’t afford the expensive handcrafted wooden figurines that include shepherds, sheep, ducks, the “duck lady”, the goose man, the wine seller, the water carrier, the fisherman ... you get the idea.
  • Like ours, gathered across 30 years of trips to Italy, many scenes have eclectic members from different styles and types, many plastic, some wood and now with tiny electric motors driving fires under cauldrons and water through fountains and wells. Children invariably fiddle and fuss with the placement of the characters right up to Christmas Eve and some fathers are known to smuggle extra figures from Italy that have been purchased from Brico — the Italian equivalent of Bunnings, which clears out its summer barbecue area and fills it with diorama backgrounds, electric gadgets and a vast array of figures.

    With Brico filling the gap for families wanting a cheaper traditional alternative to the more northerly Christmas tree in Italy the question remains how the 21st-century house down the street got its 13th-century decoration? The answer is that great cultural magpie, the US. As part of a thriving street decoration tradition in middle America large presipios now jostle with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in department stores.

    It’s a long way around, but who knows? Australian households, wary of real trees and troubled by lack of space in modern flats, may just start making the 21st century switch to the 13th.

    Dennis Shanahan is the political editor of The Australian.

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Giacché abbiamo menzionato Luciano De Crescenzo e la sua suddivisione degli esseri umani tra "presepisti" ed "alberisti", ecco un bel brano, molto divertente, tratto dal romanzo Così parlò Bellavista, del 1977, in cui si parla appunto del presepe. Alcune parti del dialogo sono in napoletano ma non preoccupatevi!, abbiamo inserito la traduzione in italiano accanto alle frasi e parole napoletane. Il brano è seguito da un breve video tratto dal programma Tg3 Bell'Italia, del 1999, in cui De Crescenzo parla di che cosa? Esatto, del presepe:

≪A proposito di Natale, io e il barone abbiamo cominciato a fare il presepe come tutti gli anni e ci sono voluti due giorni solo per aprire tutte le scatole dei pastori, levare la polvere ed incollare con la colla di pesce braccia e gambe spezzate.≫

≪Il presepe≫ dice il professore ≪per noi napoletani è una cosa veramente importante, lei ingegnere scusi preferisce il presepe o l’albero di Natale?≫

≪Il presepe, ovviamente.≫

≪E ne sono contento per lei≫ mi dice il professore stringendomi la mano. ≪Veda, gli esseri umani si dividono in presepisti ed alberisti e questa è una conseguenza della suddivisione del mondo in mondo d’amore e mondo di libertà ma questo è un discorso lungo che potremo fare un’altra volta, oggi invece vi vorrei parlare del presepe e dei presepisti≫

≪Forza professò ≫ dice Salvatore. ≪Parlateci del presepe che qua stanno i ragazzi vostri!≫

≪Dunque , come vi dicevo, la suddivisione in presepisti ed alberisti è tanto importante che, secondo me, dovrebbe comparire sui documenti d’identità come il sesso ed il gruppo sanguigno. E già per forza, perché altrimenti un povero dio rischierebbe di scoprire solo a matrimonio avvenuto di essersi unito con un cristiano di tendenze natalizie diverse. Adesso sembra che io esageri, eppure è così: l’alberista si serve per vivere di una scala di valori completamente diversa da quella del presepista. Il primo tiene in gran conto la Forma, il Denaro e il Potere; il secondo invece pone ai primi posti l’Amore e la Poesia.≫

≪Noi qua in questa casa≫ dice Saverio, ≪siamo tutti presepisti, è vero professò?≫

≪No, non tutti. Mia moglie e mia figlia, ad esempio, come quasi tutte le donne, sono alberiste.≫

≪Ad Assuntina piace l’albero di Natale≫ dice sottovoce Saverio.

≪Tra le due categorie non ci può essere colloquio, uno parla e l’altro non capisce. La moglie vede che il marito fa il presepe e dice: “Ma perché invece di appuzzolentire tutta casa con la colla di pesce, il presepe non lo vai a comprare già bello e fatto all’UPIM?”. Il marito non risponde. E già perché all’UPIM si può comprare l’albero di Natale che è bello solo quando è finito e quando si possono accendere le luci, il presepe invece no, il presepe è bello quando lo fai o addirittura quando lo pensi: “Adesso viene Natale e facciamo il presepe. Quelli a cui piace l’albero di Natale sono solo dei consumisti, il presepista invece, bravo o non bravo, diventa creatore ed il suo vangelo è “Natale in casa Cupiello”.≫

≪Io l’ho visto professò e mi ricordo di quando Eduardo dice: “Il presebbio l’ho fatto tutto da solo e contrastato dalla famiglia”.≫

≪I pastori≫ continua Bellavista. ≪Debbono essere quelli di creta, fatti a mano, un poco brutti e soprattutto nati a San Gregorio Armeno, nel cuore di Napoli, e non quelli di plastica che si vendono all’UPIM, e che sembrano finti; i pastori debbono essere quelli degli anni precedenti e non fa niente se sono quasi tutti un poco scassati, l’importante è che il capofamiglia li conosca per nome uno per uno, e sappia raccontare per ogni pastore nu bello fattariello (un bel aneddoto): “Questo è Benito che non teneva voglia (aveva voglia) di lavorare e che dormiva sempre; questo è il padre di Benito che pascolava le pecore sopra alla montagna; e questo è il pastore della meraviglia” e a mano a mano che i pastori escono dalla scatola, c’è la presentazione. Il padre presenta i pastori ai figli più piccoli, che così ogni anno, quando viene Natale, li possono riconoscere e li possono voler bene come a persone di famiglia. Personaggi della vita, anche se storicamente inaccettabili come ‘O monaco (il monaco)  e ‘O cacciatore c’o fucile (il cacciatore col fucile).≫

≪Professò, po’ ce sta (poi c'è) ‘o cuoco (il cuoco), ‘a tavulella cu’ e’ ddoie coppie assettate (la tavola con le due coppie sedute), ‘o mellunaro (il venditore di cocomeri), o’ verdummaro (il venditore di verdura), chille ca venne ‘e castagne (quello che vende le castagne), ‘o canteniere (il vinaio), ‘o chianchiere (il macellaio).≫

≪Ebbè,≫ dice Salvatore «pure a quell’epoca si doveva faticare fino a notte tarda per poter campare.≫

≪E poi ci sta ‘a lavannara (la lavandaia),≫ continua Saverio ≪‘o pastore che porta ‘e pullastre (il personaggio che porta i polli [a Napoli, per pastore s'intende qualsiasi statuina del presepe eccetto la Sacra Famiglia, gli angeli, i Re magi, e le figurine di animali]), ‘o piscatore che pesca overamente (il pescatore che pesca per davvero) nell’acqua vera che scende da dentro all’enteroclisma (in inglese: enema) messo dietro al presepe.≫

≪Papà mio,≫ dice Luigino, ≪quelli un poco scassati li riusciva sempre a mettere in maniera tale che poi nessuno si accorgeva se tenevano un braccio o una gamba di meno; mi diceva: “Luigì, adesso papà trova una posizione strategica per questo povero pastoriello che ha perduto una coscia”, e lo piazzava dietro a una siepe o dietro a un muretto, e poi mi ricordo che avevamo un pastore che ogni anno si perdeva qualche pezzo, tanto che alla fine ci rimase solo la testa e papà la piazzò dietro a una finestrella di una casetta. Papà le casette le faceva con le scatole delle medicine e poi dentro ci metteva la luce, e quando, durante l’anno, io mi dovevo prendere una medicina, per esempio uno sciroppo che non mi piaceva, allora lui prendeva lo scatolino e mi diceva: “Luigì, questo scatolo ce lo conserviamo per quando viene Natale, che cosi ne facciamo una bella casetta per il presepio, tu però bell’ 'e papà (bello di papà) devi finire prima la medicina che ci sta dentro, se no papà la casarella (la casetta) come la fa?”≫

≪E poi, quando veniva la mezzanotte,≫ continua Salvatore ≪ci mettevamo tutti in processione e giravamo per tutta la casa cantando “Tu scendi dalle stelle”. Il più piccolo della famiglia avanti con il bambino Gesù, e tutti quanti dietro con una candela accesa tra le mani.≫

≪O’ presepe (il presepe)! L’addore d’a colla ‘e pesce (l'odore della colla di pesce), ‘o suvero  pe fa ‘e muntagne (il sughero per fare le montagne), ‘a farina pe fa ‘a neve… (la farina per fare la neve...)≫ 


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Adesso parliamo del panettone, il dolce natalizio milanese che ha conquistato l'Italia e tutto il mondo, infatti lo si trova anche da Woolworths e Coles anche se noi lo, o meglio, li compriamo ad Haberfield. Ecco la definizione di panettone del Treccani:

panettóne s. m. [adattam. del milan. panattón, der. di pane]:

Tipico dolce milanese, a forma di cupola, la cui lavorazione comporta due impasti, il primo, alla sera, fatto con farina, lievito, burro e zucchero, il secondo, al mattino seguente, fatto con farina, burro, zucchero, sale, cedro, uva sultanina e tuorli d’uovo, che vengono incorporati nella pasta già lievitata, ottenendo così un nuovo impasto che, collocato in stampi cilindrici, è cotto in forno; attribuito dalla leggenda alla corte viscontea del ’300, ma probabilmente di origine più antica, è tradizionale in tutta Italia come dolce natalizio. 

Ecco dei video che parlano appunto del famoso panettone spiegandone il metodo di preparazione e la sua storia origine:




Italian lessons Sydney

In questo brano interessantissimo tratto dal libro Delizia: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food, del 2007, John Dickie spiega come in Italia vige il culto del cibo "genuino" anche se non è sempre chiaro cosa s'intende per "genuino", e vige una costante nostalgia per la cucina dei tempi passati, ovvero per la cucina della nonna. Abbiamo inserito il brano in questo articolo di blog perché il signor Dickie accenna anche al panettone! Alla fine dell'articolo troverete un breve filmato tratto da Viaggio nella Valle del Po, alla ricerca dei cibi genuini, il documentario menzionato da Dickie. Purtroppo non siamo riusciti a trovare in rete il segmento dove Mario Soldati si reca alla fabbrica di formaggi vicino a Lodi, ma abbiamo incluso un segmento dove Soldati visita una fabbrica di mortadella e di prosciutto cotto che rende altrettanto bene la perplessità di Soldati, che nonostante ciò fuma tranquillamente! Eccoli:    

Italian food conservatism expressed itself in other ways. One of the most influential was nostalgia. In the very years when they were taking their first steps as consumers, Italians also discovered that the authentic ingredients and dishes of days gone by were an endangered treasure. Just as hunger was disappearing from the peninsula, Italians were told that good food was a thing of the past. 

One of the most captivating early expressions of Italian food nostalgia was a series filmed during the year, 1957, that advertising first appeared on Italian television. The twelve episodes of In Search of Genuine Foods. A Journey along the Po Valley were a major undertaking for Italy's RAI TV, which itself had only been in operation for three years: the camera and sound crew was fifteen-strong, and they travelled in a six-vehicle convoy that included a lorry and a minibus. In Search of Genuine Foods was made and presented by Mario Soldati. Apart from being a novelist, screenwriter and film-maker, he was also Italy's most eloquent 'wandering glutton' in the tradition established during the Fascist era by the Touring Club Italiano and Paolo Monelli. Soldati's idiosyncratic and opinionated style is stamped all over his programme. He looked like a movie director who had hired himself from Central Casting - beret, tortoiseshell glasses, neat little moustache, sports jacket, and an eyepiece worn round the neck. He showed himself standing up in his jeep at the head of the convoy, and ordering his film crew around with peremptory blasts on a whistle. His interviewing style involved rarely allowing anyone else to finish a sentence. It all made for superb entertainment, and a remarkable document of the changing face of Italian food. 


Soldati's aim was to seek out what he called 'genuine gastronomy'. Some of his programme's earliest sequences, shot in his home region of Piedmont, show most clearly what he had in mind. By a mountain torrent below the snowy, pyramid-shaped peak of Mount Monviso close to the source of the Po, Soldati films a man fishing with a rod and line for trout no longer than his hand. Down in the plain near Chieri, he interviews a peasant about the cardoons he grows; after being buried to their tips for eight days to acquire the right pallor, they are sent just up the road to Turin where they are dipped in bagna cauda, the city's warm garlic and anchovy sauce. In the seventeenth-century town of Chierasco, Soldati examines the local 'horse-rump bullocks', which are fed a special diet, including eggs, to accentuate the distinctive shape and taste of their haunches. In Turin itself, Soldati sees grissini breadsticks made by hand, and visits one of Italy's oldest and grandest restaurants, just across from the building that accommodated the country's first parliament. Back in the studio, he introduces a countess in twin-set and pearls who demonstrates how to make a fondue topped with truffle shavings, and explains that 'social tragedy' is the fate of any housewife who serves her guests a fondue that is stringy rather than creamy. This was an image of Italian eating that could easily have been painted a century earlier. 

But perhaps the most telling moment in Soldati's journey is when he finds himself amid the huge steel tubes, enamelled vats and gleaming domed inspection hatches of a giant cheese factory near Lodi, south-east of Milan. Here the boss is not a landowner but an entrepreneur in a double-breasted suit, and his key employees wear white coats and spend their time taking readings from gauges. The milk comes from cows reared on concentrated soya-based feeds from Japan. Looking around him, Soldati removes his beret and gives his head a demonstratively downhearted scratch. Then, talking direct to camera in a resigned tone, he concedes that there is no other way adequately to feed the masses: 'The great majority of what we eat is industrialised. So if I had had to limit my search for what is genuine only to things that are artisanal, hand-made and traditional, I would have ended up showing you, the viewers, a gastronomy that would be out of reach in most cases. Unless you wanted to die of hunger.' Soldati's mood picks up as the factory tour progresses. He sees large balls of provolone being shaped by hand, and perfect, house-shaped stacks of the mulberry logs that are burned to smoke the cheese. At the end of the tour, the genuine and the industrial are reconciled when Soldati takes a stroll in a warehouse where some of the factory's 50,000 Grana Padano cheeses are slowly maturing. He ends the programme at table, extolling the time-honoured virtues of Grana and Parmigiano-Reggiano, the two varieties of Parmesan. Recalling an ancient piece of Italian wisdom, he recommends that the 'king of cheeses' be eaten at the end of a meal with 'the queen of fruits', the pear. 

The curious thing about Soldati's search for genuine foods is his uncertainty. He never quite makes up his mind where to draw the line between what is genuine and what is industrial. Part of him wants to restrict 'genuine' to the man fishing for trout in the Alps. Another part of him is less wistful. Some of Italian food's most genuine traditions centre on products like cheeses, hams, salami and pasta secca: they were originally designed for preservation, transport and trade, and therefore lend themselves well to industrial methods. Telling the difference between what is genuine and what is artificial is not always as easy as choosing a plate of maccheroni over a concoction of jam, yoghurt, mustard and milk. 

Soldati's uncertainty has run through the history of Italian food since the economic miracle. Italy is still a country 'in search of genuine foods', a country permanently nostalgic for the dishes of yesteryear. What the term 'genuine' might actually mean has never been clear: it is too misted with nostalgia, too vulnerable to appropriation by advertisers. Yet 'genuine' has retained its magical aura. Despite the confusion surrounding it, a belief in what is genuine, combined with a regret for what has become industrial or artificial, has been written into the statutes of Italy's civilisation of the table: it has become an article of Italian gastronomic faith. 

Italians only take foods to their hearts that have a claim to being genuine. Or 'typical' or 'authentic' or 'traditional', which have the same vague and evocative appeal. The contemporary era is the era of national foods, dishes that, for the first time in history, have united culinary Italy from north to south, and from top to bottom of the social scale. All national foods have a sound pedigree in one or other region of the peninsula, yet all are made on an industrial scale. Panettone is one instance: the deliciously soft, light cake with candied fruit was originally a Milanese speciality. But by the time of In Search of Genuine Foods, shrewd marketing had turned it into a Christmas treat for all. One company used to present panettoni to winners in the hugely popular Giro d'Italia cycle race. Genuine Milanese panettone was already becoming an object of nostalgia - Soldati visits a pastry shop that is one of the few still making it in the original way. 

Other national dishes, like pizza and mozzarella, came from the south to conquer the north. The provolone that Soldati sees being made at the factory in Lombardy is another case in point. This melon-shaped cheese was brought up to the Po valley in the early 1900s by southern entrepreneurs in search of a more fertile commercial terrain. The factory owner tells Soldati that 70 to 80 per cent of provolone is now made in the north. 

The mass migration of the economic miracle had much to do with this nationalisation process. Southerners took their favourite foods to Turin, for example, and in time they also learned to like bagna cauda, just as the torinesi learned to like pasta with tomato sauce (although in the early years prejudiced locals sneered that 'dirty southerners' grew tomatoes in the bathtub and basil in the bidet). 

Since the 1950S, the spread of national dishes has gathered pace and, in the process, the confusion surrounding what is genuine has become ever greater. In most of Italy, there is nothing traditional about eating rocket, balsamic vinegar and buffalo-milk mozzarella. Yet these foods became national crazes in the 1980s and 1990S by selling themselves as authentic products, hallowed by the ages. (Shortly afterwards, of course, the craze swept through supermarkets in the rest of the world.) Italian food can only reinvent itself by pretending it has stayed the same. Change only comes in the guise of continuity; novelties must be presented as nostalgic relics. This food conservatism is a cultural quirk that makes for a great deal of misunderstanding and cant. But it is the Italian civilisation of the table's saving virtue in the age of mass production.



Sempre a proposito del panettone, ecco un resoconto buffissimo sul rito del panettone a Diana San Pietro, un paesino dell'entroterra ligure, e dell'espediente adottato dalle sorelle Hawes, a cui il panettone non piace molto, per non ritrovarsi in casa decine di panettoni "aperti", e per evitare di comprarne degli altri. Il brano è tratto dal bellissimo libro del 2001, Extra Virgin: Amongst the Olive Groves of Liguria, di Annie Hawes:

I don't know about the rest of Italy - I hear it's different in the South - but here people seem to have used up all their culinary inspiration on the savouries and have none left over for the sweet stuff. The favourite local pastry, over which our friends here go into delirium, is a thing called the crostata, a close relative of the jam tart, but rather more like the bits of leftover pastry our granny used to spread thinly with jam and bung into the bottom of the oven for us kids so it wouldn't go to waste. I daresay if this is all you're used to in the way of baked sweetmeats, panettone isn't too bad. Maybe, but we can't keep up with the steady influx of the things, and by the sixth or seventh day of Christmas the boxes of half-eaten panettone sitting about the place have begun to mount up disturbingly. Even more annoyingly, since you can't go to anyone's house without one, we keep having to go and buy more of the things into the bargain. In desperation we come up with a cunning plan: we'll recycle them. As each new one arrives, we pop it, still in its huge box, on to the shelf with its friends and relations, and offer chunks from an earlier one instead. Now we can take the unopened ones with us on our own calls, dramatically reducing the backlog and concealing our ungratefulness at a stroke. Clever. 


Or perhaps not so clever after all: we soon find out that we are not alone in thinking up this solution to the overwhelmed-by-panettone period. One of our own recycled items reappears upon our kitchen table a week later, recognizable by a bit of my scribbling on its box. We can't remember who originally gave it to us, or who we passed it on to, there being so many of the things flying about at the moment, but with the help of the shamefaced culprits Mimmo and Lorella we work out that it has visited at least four homes on its Christmas circuit without ever being opened so far: must have done, because it was given to them by someone we hardly know and can't possibly have given it to. Food for thought. Can the whole panettone business be an enormous confidence trick? Are we the only people foolish enough to actually eat the things? 

E, per finire, e per la gioia dei maschietti, ecco Nigellissima: An Italian Inspired Christmas, del 2012, in cui la meravigliosa Nigella Lawson prepara un budino a base di panettone e tanti altri piatti d'ispirazione italiana, il tutto inframmezzato da scene girate in una Venezia invernale assolutamente stupenda. Eccolo e buon Natale e felice anno nuovo a tutti gli amici e studenti di Italia 500!!!

Street Fight in Naples by Peter Robb

22/1/2013

 
Street Fight in Naples - Peter Robb (Allen & Unwin; RRP $32.99). For those who are not familiar with Peter Robb, he is an amazing writer! Author of Midnight in Sicily and M, a biography of the artist Caravaggio, in 2010 he published Street Fight in Naples, which is a must read even for those who are not familiar with the city itself. Here's a description:

"Naples is always a shock, flaunting beauty and squalor like nowhere else. Naples is the only city in Europe whose ancient past still lives in its irrepressible people. Their ancestors came from all over the early Mediterranean to the wide bay and its islands, shadowed by a dormant volcano. Not all of them found what they were looking for, but they made a great and terribly human city.
Peter Robb's Street Fight in Naples ranges across nearly three thousand years of Neapolitan life and art, from the first Greek landings in Italy to his own less auspicious arrival thirty-something years ago.
In 1503 Naples became the Mediterranean capital of Spain's world empire and the base for the Christian struggle with Islam. It was a European metropolis matched only by Paris and Istanbul, an extraordinary concentration of military power, lavish consumption, poverty and desperation. As the occupying empire went into crisis, exhausted by its wars against Islamists in the Mediterranean and Protestants in the North, the people of Naples paid a dreadful price.
Naples was where in 1606 the greatest painter of his age fled from Rome after a fatal street fight. Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio found in its teeming streets an image of the age's crisis, and released among the painters of Naples the energies of a great age in European art- until everything erupted in a revolt by the dispossessed, and the people of an occupied city brought Europe into the modern world". 

Sounds fascinating? Yes, it most definitely is!!! Peter Robb was interviewed by Phillip Adams on Late Night Live on the 22/8/12. We tried to find a link to the programme but to no avail so we've included the podcast (being subscribers to Late Night Live) in the audio file below. It's a precious interview and a shame not to share. Buon ascolto!!!
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    At Italia 500 we've been offering Italian courses, in Sydney, since 1995 and one of the most beautiful aspects of learning Italian is that it opens the door to a culture of unrivalled richness and diversity. In this blog we'll be sharing some of our favourite books, movies, places in Italy to visit, music, links to podcasts, information about local and international Italian themed events, and the odd "personal" view, in the hope that it will encourage you to delve further into a culture which continues to inspire us and millions of people all over the world.       

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Italian classes Sydney Italia 500 Italian Centre for Language and Cultural Studies Teaching Italian in Sydney since 1995



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