La Festa dei Ceri

We have, by happenstance, ended up in the town of Gubbio the weekend before La Festa dei Ceri, a pageant, held yearly, since the 12th century, on May 15.

The mechanics are difficult to do justice to: there are three large “candles,” which are not candles at all, but rather 300 kg wooden pillars. Atop each gets mounted a figure of one of three saints—St. Ubaldo, St. Anthony, and St. George.

Tomorrow morning, in a sort of festival pre-show, the candles are brought down the mountain from the Basilica, where they spend the off-season.

On the 15th, the scene is described like this on the sign we encountered today:

The culminating part of the festival is reached in the late afternoon, when begins a frantic rush that runs through the city and then goes up to the slopes of Mount Ingino bringing back the Ceri in the Basilica, where they will remain until the first Sunday of May of the next year.

The town is currently being festooned with banners; they hang from almost every window.
There are three different banners, one for each of the three saints: red and yellow for St. Ubaldo; red and azure for St. George; red and black for St. Anthony.

We took a “birdcage”—a precarious-seeming standing chairlift—up Mount Ingino this afternoon to visit the candles ourselves. Tomorrow, for, what, the 800-and-somethingth time, they’ll be the centre of everything; today, they were just sitting alone by themselves in a corner of the Basilica.

It’s all rather weird and wonderful to be amidst.