In Umbria, you know spring is in the air when the balestrieri (“cross-bowers”) compete in the piazzas seated behind their crossbows, one eye closed, taking aim. The crossbow is an inherent part of colorful medieval festivals animating Umbria, “Italy’s green heart” and here in Assisi, La Compagnia Balestrieri di Assisi is integral part of the wondrous pageantry of Assisi’s early May festival, il Calendimaggio, celebrating spring.
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“L’Italia e’ libera. L’Italia risorgera'” (“Italy is free. Italy will rise again”) announced the headlines of the newspaper Il Popolo, referring to the liberation from Fascist control of Milan and Turin April 25, 1945. Nowadays, on this day all over Italy, Italians gather to honor their fallen soldiers and in paricular, i partigiani, the partisans of the Italian Resistance who fought the Nazis as well as Mussolini’s Fascist troops. Some towns will celebrate la Festa della Liberazione with political rallies or tributes at war monuments, others with concerts or marching bands, and some with flags, huge ones.
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Rural youth living near the tiny walled hilltown of Grello (pop. 45) run whenever they can these days. In serious training. But not for a a track meet.
They’ll be running with fire on the night of June 23rd, vigil of the feast of St. John the Baptist, patron saint of this mountainside castle-village. Rituals in the Baptist’s honor intertweave water rites with fire (his feast is at the time of the summer solstice); in fact, fire and water, propitious elements of purification, combine and merge in many late June Umbrian festivities, all rooted in Roman rituals.
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With January 17th and the Feast of St. Anthony, Carnevale (Mardi Gras) took over here in Italy and will reign until martedì grasso (“fat Tuesday,” the day before the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday). Our family knows it’s Carnevale time when Peppa comes visiting with the traditional sweet, castagnole ((recipe below). I remember Mattia’s…
If there was any central theme to the 2012 U.S. tour (my fourteenth annual winter tour!), it had to be “communication”.
Above all, through cooking – but not only: in Denver, I shared “Memoirs of Rural Life” with over 400 persons through my Power-pointed lecture. Another lecture in Denver, “Italians, HANDS ON!”, encouraged participants to communicate with Italian gestures. A few Italian gestures also slipped into my Umbrian rural cuisine cooking classes in private homes from Los Angeles to Washington, DC.
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