Festival of Santa Rosa

Chairs line the sidewalks.  Blankets and pillows cover the steps by fountains in piazzas.  People young and old sit outside visiting with each other, reading, looking at phones, playing cards.  They have bags of food and small coolers.  Some have umbrellas to protect from sun or possible rain. (The day before rain stopped the procession of the heart of Santa Rosa -- everyone stood in the streets waiting.  One woman told me, "We're just waiting.  This has never happened before.  They had to stop the procession.")  They have been here since as early as 9am (or earlier?) staking out spots.

Flags and banners hang outside windows -- some express Viterbo pride; some say Facchini and have pictures of men with their arms up as if holding the macchina.

The procession of the statue of Santa Rosa (the macchina) begins at 9pm.  By 6pm, my colleagues  tell me, you won't be able to walk down the street or sidewalks because both will be so packed.  I have seen the scaffolding and constructing of the macchina since the day I arrived to Viterbo, driving through the Porta Romana, the scaffolding a hundred feet high in preparation over a month ago.  People told me for the first five weeks I was here, "It's something to see.  It's the biggest event of the year.  The city gets crazy."

The statue is 30 meters high and weighs 5 tons (in understandable terms for me, this is 2000 pounds and 98 feet high).   One hundred plus men carry it through the city from the Porta Romana up and down streets all the way to the Chiesa di Santa Rosa, the patron saint of Viterbo.  Plaques marking the route and stops of the macchina take the place of cobblestones in certain spots in the city.

(This weekend we googled Santa Rosa of Viterbo to find out why she was canonized as a saint.  She was not in my sixth grade bible bee or in the miniature books of saints I had as a kid, and I didn't know whether she was a martyr -- do all saints need to be martyrs?  Here's what we learned this week:  Rose lived in poverty, allegedly raised her aunt from the dead when Rose was about three years old, opposed the king who was objecting to the pope, preached to folks to do good and to do penances, stood in a fire for three hours unscathed to rid a town of a sorceress and thereby converted all the town, including the sorceress, to Christianity.  Today I learned that people -- especially mothers -- prayed to Santa Rosa for years after her death, petitions for health and help.)

Before heading to SYA for a potluck and Santa Rosa gathering -- SYA is on the route, and we can get a great view from the windows and balconies -- Sebastian wants to see the final hill that the facchini run up to get to the chiesa of Santa Rosa.  So he, Hannah, and I grab a cannolo and piece of limone pie and walk over.  It's an impressive hill, and the steps at the top are reserved for the families of the facchini.  Sebastian keeps telling me, "Ask if we can sit here."  (More indication that he needs to learn Italian soon.)  I ask a few people, and they kindly explain that these spots are for the families and that those spots are for an emergency exit.  (I understand one of every fifteen words they say, but the gestures and the occasional word give me the jist.)  After all, there is danger here: if a facchino slips or falls, if the statue falls...I picture the devastation, and I want to google Santa Rosa macchina accident to see whether there has been one.

As we approach our apartment, Sebastian and Hannah remain adamant that they do not want to watch from the safety and comfort of SYA.  They want the real deal, the whole experience from the ground and with Italians.  Sebastian stakes out a spot in Piazza de Fontana Grande (one block from our apartment in one direction and one block from SYA in the other); Hannah comes up to the apartment to get water, sheet, blanket, kindles, and joins him.

By 7pm, it's Sebastian, Hannah, Mary, and I on the blanket.  (Daniel and Connor are enjoying the potluck and window seats at SYA.) It's like being at the Esplanade on July 4 or at First Night in Boston on New Year's Eve or on a beach where you can't move except for those little spaces between blankets and towels.  Sebastian reads his kindle; I begin An Odyssey; the girls make a new buddy and play Uno.

At 7:30pm, a man with an entourage walks up the street and everyone cheers, Manzini! Manzini! Manzini!  Huge cheers.
I ask a woman nearby, "Qui e?"
"Manzini," she says.
"Qui e Manzini?" I ask.  I know I seem a dunce, but I'm a terrible faker.
She gets her friend to help translate, "Il presidente de reppublica de Italia."
I google (pathetic, but true): Matteo Manzini, deputy prime minister of Italy.  (And this is something else to figure out: now that I have gotten a handle on podcasts and I'm enjoying catching up on American life with choice of what to listen to and what not to listen to, do I instead follow Italian politics and life?  Do I live fully in one place or listen to the news of one and live in the other?)

At 7:45pm the facchini -- all dressed in white with red sashes -- walk up Via Cavour in rows.  Over a hundred men, arms locked in lines of eight or ten (?), striking in their attire and in their quest.  The crowd chants, Facchini!  Facchini!  Facchini!  It's a praise, an awe, a cheer.  These men are heroes, taking on this labor for honor and for the festival of Santa Rosa.

They head up the hill now to the Porta Romana where a priest will administer last rites to them before they carrry the towering macchina through the city.  The four of us sit and talk about last rites (I knew this sacrament in the list by grade three; my kids have never heard of last rites), why the men might need it, how they must be feeling, what could potentially happen.

At 9:20pm, the lights around us go out.  The city is officially dark now except for the ubiquitous phone lights/camera lights.  We are guilty in this, too.  And then there it is, the macchina, coming around a corner into view, its candles lighting up the air.

The towering, sparkling, intricate macchina hovers in the sky, immense against the black sky.  It moves up and down just a little with the steps of men we cannot see.  It tilts a little.  I gasp a little -- could it fall?  could it not fall?  It mesmerizes.  I can only stare in wonder at what seems an apparition, this statue coming through the night down this hill toward us.  It is beautiful.  Surreal.  Stunning with its candles against the night sky.   I am surprised by my own excitement and reverence as the tower makes it down the road to us.  There's so much humanity there, so much spirit in the facchini, in the construction of the macchina, in the man-hours to have made this happen, in the gathering of people to celebrate their patron saint.  There's something about its hugeness and its brightness, about human men carrying it that makes me gape, that makes me think, It's not that surprising that the Trojans let in the Trojan Horse.  Its immensity, strangeness, perhaps even beauty must have attracted the Trojans to it, wanting it inside those walls.

The facchini set the macchina down at Piazza del Fontana Grande, the first stop on the procession.  It is mere feet from us.  Sebastian has been taking videos and photos with my phone.  He hands back the phone and says, "I just want to look at it now, like you do.  It looks brighter, less golden, not through the camera."  He hands the phone to Mary for her turn to take videos and photos.  He and I stand there looking at the macchina.  He points out that we would never see this type of thing in the U. S. 

I tell him, "Well, we have something like it, I bet." 

He says, "Maybe.  But this type of statue would be surrounded by nets or some protection.  It would be all about safety."

He's right.  There is no barrier between the Santa Rosa macchina and us.  It is the people, the machinna, the air.  We stand there looking up.

Admiring.