Napoli. Day Five

Easter Monday

I'm from a devoted Catholic family - an AltarBoy, chief thurable bearer and bell ringer. I still love a good Easter procession and had high hopes that Naples would deliver. But then someone let slip that really it was only the more rural locations that followed the traditions...sad face

On Easter Monday Morning we were preparing breakfast when I heard
faint jazzy brass and rumbling drums drifting through the alleys and up to our balcony.

By the time we'd finished the breakfast ritual and headed out, the noise of a raucous marching band filled the air, and round a blind corner, marching slowly, swaying side to side, came a brigade of large men and young children carrying huge, heavily embroidered banners, all led by a clattering brass band and followed by a huge floating sculpture of a Madonna of the Seas carried by more burly men in celebratory uniforms of tee shirts and sweat towels also swaying as they marched, straining to carry their precious icon through the narrow street made narrower by crowds of onlookers, which we joined and followed.

We'd seen the Madonna float before, she'd been moored outside a mechanics workshop, among dumpsters and broken down Vespas, alongside a dilapidated street shrine. But now here she was floating and swaying, all shiny, covered in confetti and newly anointed with high value Euro notes pegged to her plinth of meringue-like choppy seas.

The procession carried on up the street, but stopped abruptly outside the now titivated shrine, next to the workshop...and there, things really got going...

Driven on by the whacked-out jazzy brass band, one after another the banner carriers performed choreographed solos, twisting, swirling raising and lowering the banners in a hypnotic way. Each of the older guys, necessarily built like Sumo wrestlers, carried the biggest, heaviest, glitziest banners - these they counterbalanced by crouching, barefoot and bent-kneed, leaning backwards at extreme angles, then lowering and swirling the banners, allowing the crowd to touch and kiss the embroidered deities as they fluttered by.
One after another they performed their exhausting routines goaded on by the band - as one finished another stepped forward, their banners swirling together in a delicious act of reunion. Next came the children; boys, girls and...cue weeping...little ones barely able to carry the banners without help from their proud dads.

This was no sombre act of Holy Week remembrance but it was a passion play. There were no priests in attendance, no formality, no prayers or hymns, but there was singing and there was family love and respect
First one float-bearer came forward. He was no chorister - imagine a cross between Howling Wolf and Mariza bellowing a passionate call to passed family (my interpretation).
Now the brass band are playing like they're backing Dean Martin. Three more burly men step forward singing in fragile harmony...a choir of fallen angels, then finally the entire crew of the still swaying Madonna heave her above their heads all singing the now familiar refrain as if their lives depended on it.
We had been watching this ritual play out for half an hour when it finally stuttered to an end. Everybody, performers and audience alike were exhausted, all exchanging kisses, fist bumps and hugs. I think we were the only strangers there, but we'd clapped, ooh'd and ahh'd and wept like locals and for a brief moment we were welcomed.

Thank you and Ciao Chiaia