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Saturday, July 25, 2015

Tradition

Procession through the town on the Festa di Sant Antonio

Posted by Hilary White on Monday, 26 January 2015
What I like about Norcia is not only the food, the people, the weather, the monks, but the culture. This is a place that loves its traditions, and keeps them very consciously as a shield against the outer world that is becoming denuded of unique traditional life.

This is is a little video I took last winter on the Festa di Sant'Antonio when the townspeople bring their animals up to the monastery of St. Anthony and the priest blesses them all, and they have a little festa.



~
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4 comments:

  1. Sue Sims6:28 pm

    That's a lovely video. I was struck by the lack of excitement or demonstrative piety in the faces of the people: it called to mind a brief comment in The Return of the Native where Hardy comments: "A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction."

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  2. G. Thomas Fitzpatrick10:22 pm

    An interesting contrast to the summer Italian feasts most weekends in Boston's Notth End:

    https://youtu.be/bbNU24r3p2c

    Thomas Flanagan said there are no two people more different than an Irishman and an Irish American. The same, I think, can be said of Italians and Italian Americans.

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  3. John11:17 pm

    Melodeons!

    ReplyDelete
  4. A Daughter of Mary7:14 pm

    How wonderful to see the street in Norcia. Was there on pilgrimage in April with Canadians and Americans. Visiting the Benedictines, hearing the Tridentine Mass in the crypt was such a privilege.
    Barbara

    ReplyDelete

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