Palio dei Natalecci; every year on the 24th December the night sky in certain parts of Garfagnana is lit up with large fires. These are the Natalecci. Huge circular towers, often 10 to 15 metres tall and sometimes even as high as 20 metres, made up of trees and covered with branches of juniper which are then set alight. Villages try to outdo each other by building the tallest Nataleccio or the one that burns the longest. The origins of this ceremony have long since been lost but probably dates back to a pagan rite to the god Mitra but which was then appropriated by the Christian faith and given meaning with the fires now warming up the newly born Jesus
As the church bells ring out across the valley to announce the birth of The Messiah, the people around the Nataleccio start to sing “Oh! Oh! Nataleccio! Oh! Oh! Nataleccio!” and the fires are lit. The air is then rent with the sound of fireworks, sirens, shouts and the unmistakable sound of gunshots.
Except that this year the scene had a slightly different twist. The barganews reporting team normally call into the Bar Casotti in Gorfigliano to pick up the lastest news about the Natalecci from the effusive and well informed Daniele Casotti. It is where you should go to for information, a loaf of bread, some pasta and of course a glass of his famous red wine. The first change was that Daniele has been quietly writing a book and just this week had it published (article here) The second was due to the terrible weather with intermittent rain squalls and low cloud obscuring any high ground it was decided not to climb up through the woods to the area above Gorfigliano where they build one of the tallest juniper towers but instead to call in another constructed just the other side of the river and nearer to the village.
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The first thing noticeable upon arriving at this tower was the absence of elder men from the village. Here was a much younger group who had built their tower. Due to the rain fall over the past few weeks everything was soaked and so they were dousing the tower with large amounts of paraffin to make sure that when it was lit it would burn well. It would seem that there was also a quantity of petrol mixed in with the paraffin because as they moved round the tower with their flaming torches ready to light it on the stroke of 6pm as the church bell tower rang out something unfortunate happened.
The air around the tower exploded with a whoosh, the ground soaked with paraffin and petrol burst in flames and rushed towards the tower immediately setting it on fire before the allotted time. The flame actually ran through the legs of one of the surprised torch bearers, luckily causing no damage apart from the loss of his eyebrows as the tower ignited in front of him.
Click on the video below to get some idea of just what it was like this evening on the mountainside above Gorfigliano as the flames noisily rushed up in to the sky from the juniper towers.