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Of my long childhood, spent at Villa Maria in the Art Nouveau building in via
Miliscola, I remember with nostalgia the days preceding Easter.
The road and sidewalks are invaded by carts (loaded with barrels, “sporte” and “spaselle”)
which gravitate around the particularly active wholesale fruit and vegetable market
in Holy Week. Along this same road I often recognize myself advancing and
calling out to a woman who is carrying, clearly visible, a large chocolate egg.
He doesn’t sell it, or rather he doesn’t sell it directly; sells ninety issues including the
lucky first extract that will be released on the wheel of Naples on Saturday. The big woman and
vociante is well known and its lotteries are weekly, combined with
sacred and profane events of the calendar. She talks a lot, some say she is one
bewitching, most know her as the “nciucessa”.
Visits to the “puteka” of “Donna Emilia a’ Quartaiola”, a grand bazaar, are a must
food. The owner is always behind the large counter and her nephew, Santino, is in
I go around the shop to take, remove, measure, weigh. He has an athletic physique
associated with a distinct bearing of a true “gentleman”. Santino, confident in his
prowess, he courts all the young ladies and is gallant with all the ladies. In the
at the same time he is attentive to everything his aunt orders him and is equally attentive to
sidewalk where the bags full of “sciuscelle” are lined up in plain sight, a lot
wanted by street urchin gangs.
Fruit and vegetables are harvested in the garden where chickens are also raised which, with
as the days get longer, they are already slow to retreat into the special enclosure created for them
in a shed. The milk can be bought directly in the fund from Vittorio “o vaccaro”, and the
wine that is consumed daily is an excellent “aglianico” home-produced.
On Thursday evening, the trays in which the wheat was sown and germinated are recovered
and, burdened by their weight, we go out to reach the altar of the nearby church,
dedicated to San Marco, who is decorated with them for the celebration. Once
exposed become a source of competition for the donors who then, with pride,
they take longer steps to participate in the city “struscio”.
My father, who at Christmas allows himself the luxury of buying various bottles with
“essences” to prepare liqueurs at home, for Easter it is limited to rosolio only.
But Easter week is torture for those with a sweet tooth; in the spacious and warm kitchen,
next to the brick hearth, the hands, even of us children, knead and
they pile up flour. We make full pizzas, pastiere, casatielli; but you can’t
taste none of this, absolutely nothing until midnight on Saturday.
We are in “Lent” and we call the rag doll by the same name,
resembling a witch, hung on Ash Wednesday in the central arch of the
portico of Villa Maria. An ancient, archaic custom, which has an origin linked to pagan cults. It is a puppet of a woman dressed in black and white, the colors of mourning, and in
low below the long dress a potato held by a hanging wire
from the wooden structure of the puppet. In this potato they were stuck in a circle
seven chicken feathers, six black and one white; with the death of Carnival on Tuesday
fat, the seven weeks of Lent begin, awaiting Easter.
Every Lenten Sunday, after participating in Holy Mass and before
lunch, a black pen is removed from this symbolic doll. The last one
pen, the white one, was paraded on the evening of Holy Saturday and it indicates the end
of abstinence and the Lenten season.
During the seven weeks you should not eat meat or sweets, you should not comb your hair
hair, you don’t sweep the floor, you don’t fix the beds, you don’t sew and you don’t
cooks too elaborately; they also advised me not to cut them
nails.
In the 1950s, I was little and I understood the meaning of all these symbols
understood later; for me it was just a game in which, finally, I participated together with the
adults.
You need a long ladder to reach the nail in the center of the arch and hang it
fetish; for this purpose a special wooden one is used, the narrow one that the farmers
they use to penetrate high up into the foliage of trees, particularly on figs.
A young nephew of the settlers performs this operation and I look enviously at who
he carries out that act, which is daring for me. I dream of the day when I can go up and touch it
that trophy under the attentive gaze of the inhabitants of the Villa and also of the neighborhood.
The operation is repeated every Sunday, the young farmer climbs to the top of the steps,
he removes a feather, descends again and, once on the ground, the removed feather is burned in one
“buatta” while the rest of us, in a circle, recite prayers and old Rusina
murmurs indecipherable words. I don’t understand if they are prayers or magic words;
I still have doubts about it.
The little doll is then left alone to swing at the slightest breath of wind which certainly isn’t
missing in those months of February and March. I don’t deny that sometimes, in the evening and in the dark,
his slow lolling instills a sinister fear; in my young imagination
I associate it with the image of a witch dangling from a gallows. In the evenings
During Lenten times I avoid staying alone in the courtyard and when I have to look across it
it never rises up to under that arch from which, usually, only harmlessly hangs
stuffed “melloni” and tomato “piennoli”.
Finally Holy Saturday arrives; after the white pen the
puppet and everything is burned just as the Sacred Holy Fire burns in churches,
prelude to the dissolution of Glory, to Easter, to the end of all abstinence and
at the beginning of a new period that will hopefully be prosperous and fruitful.
Giuseppe Peluso
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