FIB: Ferragosto
Hip Hooray! It’s a holiday! Friday was Ferragosto and by sticking within the bounds of good Italian tradition, Friday in Bracciano can only be posted now. Walking out on the street that day I thought, Ferragosto is more important than Christmas, than Pasqua; what reverence for the Holy Virgin Mary’s ascension into the sky! Personally, I have to prefer the antiquated purpose of the holiday, the pagan version is nearer my grounds: fertility, the bounty, the abundance of summer almost finished.
That day was a blustery day in Bracciano with large grey bottomed clouds passing overhead. On that day I knew summer was ending and that it has been short. Maybe the extensive vacations on and around Ferragosto act as some kind of memorial, catching up for a whole summer with a week or two of sun and sand, family and friends. Like an acknowledgement of necessity in the passing of the season. That’s what the pagans must have thought as they wearied from the collection of their bounties. The hard labour of summer; the harder and more expansive is the fun.
We’re not pagans anymore and we’re a long way from it. Reading Shikasta by Doris Lessing rubs off in its distant views of the Earth, what she calls, our “Degenerative Disease.” When we begin to account for ourselves and our individual advancement above the human kind, then we suffer, it eats at our guts from the insides out. Ferragosto in Italy is awash with the do’s and don’ts’ of Bella Figura, like much else in our nonsensical world. So much of what we do is dictated by the social laws of making an outward “impression.” But, I think way back, in the origins of our times, we were bound together by tighter ropes. The closed signs in shop windows have meaning deeper and beyond what we outwardly admit.
Celebrate the passing of summer, the passing bounty; share it for a day or for weeks on end.
FIB is Fridays in Bracciano. Check out an old FIB with new controversy!
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