San Severo - la Madonna del soccorso

This is the annual run of the bulls for San Severo but instead of bulls they line the streets with strings of very mean firecrackers and occasional bits of what must be TNT (they even managed to make a small wall collapse this year) at the approximate hight of a human head. The hight is important when you add the fact that townsfolk are supposed to run en masse in front of the explosions in effort to not get burned or maimed. The fuochi, literally meaning "fires," are the main attraction of the celebrations and this fact has not settled well with the local bishop, who would like the attention to be refocused on the namesake of the events, that is the Virgin Mary. But when this fine gentleman began insisting a couple years ago that the city do away with the explosives the citizens responded with the an iron fist. For several days the bishop couldn't leave his house without getting beat up. So the explosives stayed and the bishop stayed quiet.



The fuochi featured in these videos were some of the first to be set off and consequently they were also some of the tamest. Nevertheless they still managed to shake us to our core and make our ears bleed slightly.

dance-o-tronic

this is basically what we did for an hour while they cleaned a body off of the highway.



then we did this for the rest of the day:

reading Anna Maria Ortese

I didn't understand much of what I read in the short story La casa del bosco, but I did enjoy this sentence:

Si è parlato anche, con una certa compiacenza, dell'Apocalisse, e i Cavalieri del Cielo spesso hanno animato le notti dei più infelici che spiavvano dietro i vetri di New York, o Londra o Lisbona; ma il mio idraulico, non si è mai veduto.

I'll even give you a late-night translation:

There was also talk, with a certain satisfaction, of the Apocalypse, and the Horsemen of Heaven often stirred the nights of the most unhappy who would peer from behind the windows of New York, or London, or Lisbon; but my plumber was never to be seen.

The rest of the short story wasn't much clearer.

the where

About a month of my stay was spent in the region of Apulia, which goes from the spur to the heel of the boot. Our base camp was the city of Altamura (famous for bread and Ciccillo, the prehistoric man) in the province of Bari. By depriving Raffaella of her car for days on end we managed to visit some hit cities in every province, a few of the favorites being Otranto, Gallipoli, Torre a mare, Ostuni, Alberobello, Trani and San Severo with its unique festival for the Madonna del soccorso.

Destinations outside of Apulia included Matera and the Sorrento Peninsula, famous for the Amalfi Coast. And a trip to Italy wouldn't be complete for me without a trip up north to see old friends. We even made it out to Spain for a few days. And that was about it.

that's it for italy

reading Flann O'Brien

Hatchjaw's theory in this regard is more acceptable. He tends to the view that the water was boiled and converted, probably through the water-box, into tiny jets of steam which were projected through an upper window into the night in an endeavour to wash the black 'volcanic' stains from the 'skins' or 'air-bladders' of the atmosphere and thus dissipate the hated and 'insanitary' night. However far-fetched this theory may appear, unexpected colour is lent to it by a previous court case when the physicist was fined forty shillings. On this occasion, some two years before the construction of the water-box, de Selby was charged with playing a fire hose out of one of the upper windows of his house at night, an operation which resulted in several passers-by being drenched to the skin. On another occasion he had to face the curious charge of hoarding water, the police testifying that every vessel in his house, from the bath down to a set of three ornamental egg-cups, was brimming with the liquid. Again a trumped-up charge of attempted suicide was preferred merely because the savant had accidentally half-drowned himself in a quest for some vital statistic of celestial aquatics.

It is clear from contemporary newspapers that his inquiries into water were accompanied by persecutions and legal pin-pricks unparalleled since the days of Galileo. It may be some consolation to the minions responsible to know that their brutish and barbaric machinations succeeded in denying posterity a clear record of the import of these experiments and perhaps a primer of esoteric water science that would banish much of our wordly pain and unhappiness. Virtually all that remains of de Selby's work in this regard is his house where his countless taps are still as he left them, though a newer generation of more delicate mind has the water turned off at the main.