The holidays are here again! We are celebrating by high-lighting three Italian holiday traditions: The Presepio, the Feast of the Seven Fishes, and the Befana & the Feast of the Epiphany.

As well as these time honored traditions, in the spirit of the warmth, grace and beauty of the season, we hope you enjoy our Italian Renaissance holiday greeting below. (Full screen view & audio advised.)

St Francis and the Origins of the Presepio

St Francis and the First Presepio, Giotto

In December 1223, while St Francis was staying with some of his Franciscan brothers outside the town of Greccio, he felt moved by a desire to celebrate the approaching Christmas mass by replicating the scene of poverty and humility in which Jesus had been born. He enlisted the help of his brothers and a noble supporter of the Franciscans, Giovanni Villeta. In a nearby grotto, Villeta set a manger filled with straw and a table above to celebrate mass and brought ox and donkey to the cave.
The stage was set. Friar John Speyer remembered that first Presepio sixteen years later in 1239 : “The hay in the manger was prepared, the ox and the ass were arranged around the manger, and the vigil celebration began with joy. A great multitude of people stream together … the night was filled with an unaccustomed joy and made luminous by candles and torches.”
Giovanni Villeta said that St. Francis was so overcome with emotion at the sight, he picked up the carved image of the baby in the manger and the child “came alive” and smiled at St. Francis. This “Miracle of Greccio” is depicted in Giotto’s fresco cyle in the Basilica of St. Francesco in Assisi. What is certainly true were the words of Friar John, ” And so, a new ritual … is celebrated.”

The Feast of the Seven Fishes

Or La Vigilia. We’ve never heard an authoritative answer as to why seven fishes but it is an entrenched Christmas Eve tradition. It takes awhile to settle on which seven fishes are one’s own favorites for this feast, but we have some excellent wine suggestions from Chain Bridge Cellars for various dishes. To begin the meal, (a marinated salad with crab, octopus and calamari at our house) Pra Soave Classico 2010. Moving on to the clams and muscles followed by pasta with red sauce (with lobster and shrimp), La Mondianese Grignolino. Finally for the main course (Bronzino, risotto and winter squash, broccolini) Taburno Falanghina. As for dessert, poached pears and a little Vin Santo and everyone’s ready for “a long winter’s nap.”

The Befana and the Feast of the Epiphany

The Feast of the Epiphany marks the end of holidays. The day is celebrated in many cities with a Procession of the Magi from the town hall to the Duomo . But that comes after the visit from the The Befana, a witch like character who delivers treats to children during the night on the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany. As with most legends, there are many variations of this story and this is one of them: Long ago an old woman spent her days cleaning her home – dusting, polishing, sweeping from chimney to floor. One evening in the middle of her toil, there was a knock at her door. Broom still in hand, she opened the door and was startled to see three richly clad strangers. They told her they were following a star in search of a newborn king and asked if she knew where the child might be. The Befana was bewildered and said she knew nothing of such a child. The three gentleman asked her to join them in their search but the old woman declined saying she had too much housework to do, closed the door and resumed her endless sweeping. The three men regretfully left her and continued their journey. Not long after dismissing them, the Befana grew troubled. She couldn’t stop thinking about the three exotic strangers and the child they were seeking. Suddenly her housework seemed meaningless – especially as providence seemed to have chosen her, alone in her humble home, for such a invitation. What a fool she had been not to have seen that! Now she saw that she had made her own life so trivial by spending all of her days obsessively cleaning and scrubbing that she had missed the everything – even when the miraculous knocked at her very door. Maybe it wasn’t too late to find the three wise men, go with them and give her own gifts if they found the baby. Desperately, she gathered the most valuable objects she had to give to the child, tied them in a satchel, and ran out the door. She searched and searched through the night but she never found the Magi. Alone, she searches still and because her foolishness kept her from finding the baby they were seeking, she gives gifts to good children the night before the Feast of the Magi.

-Wendi Berkowitz ’11 Traveler

In his 1934 essay “The Best Picture” on Piero’s The Resurrection, Aldous Huxley claimed “…if it were necessary to sacrifice all of Botticelli’s works in order to save The Resurrection, the Madonna della Misericordia and the Arezzo frescoes, I should unhesitatingly commit the Primavera and all the rest of them [Botticelli’s works] to the flames.” Shortly after Huxley’s essay was published, British art lovers began to wear a path between Arezzo with Piero’s spectacular fresco cycle The Legend of the True Cross; to the tiny town of Monterchi which holds The Madonna del Parto (The Pregnant Madonna); to San Sepulcro, Piero’s home town and home to The Resurrection and The Madonna Misericordia and across the Apennines to Urbino and The Flagellation and The Madonna Senigallia. In 1954, one of these  travelers was twenty year old John Pope-Hennessy who decided to find out for himself if Huxley was right. Hennessey added his own “best of” by acclaiming Piero’s The Flagellation as the “greatest small painting in the world.” The trail was popularized in John Mortimer’s novel Summer’s Lease and the BBC and later PBS television series based on it. In the book, a trio of British travelers staying in “Chiantishire” (Tuscany) takes the trail “to see what all the fuss is about.”

What is all the fuss about? My first personal experience (I am not being sentimental here – that is what it is) with Piero was while I was standing in front of The Resurrection in San Sepulchro nearly 20 years ago. (At the time, The Legend of the True Cross was still under restoration.) It was the most arresting painting I had ever seen. Serene, dignified, puzzlingly modern, mysterious, a wholly unique milieu and authentic. Authentic to what, I am not sure I can say. I could say all of the facts about painter and fresco, but as with all of Piero’s work, there is something more. Something so resonant it cannot be named. Enigmatic but real. Too much conventional analysis reduces the mystery of its mesmerizing power. His works always seems more human than divine and yet through their “humanness” they are more sacred than the most reverentially rendered painting. I could not stop looking at it. You want to enter the scene – enter his entirely unique imagination. In this way “transportable” characterizes his painting after all: he takes you to a mysterious place he has imagined and yet a place you recognize some place in your consciousness.

I still gaze at the image of The Resurrection but in a far less satisfying way. I have a large mounted reproduction of it in front of my desk. Four other Piero’s from the trail surround me. I’ve had them in my office – wherever that office has been – since 1995. Visitors unfailingly ask all about the paintings and I obviously enjoy talking about them – yet that’s not why they are there. They resonate beyond their immediate visual asset. Often I see a new metaphor he has worked or a detail yet unnoticed. Or something he has referenced that I had not noticed in 20 years of looking. Sublime little miniatures of light play or a harmonic line I had not seen before. But most of all they resonate because they remind me of seeing the “real” image in its “real” place – of the experience of looking at what the master himself saw when he conceived it and then gave it to the world.

Santa Croce Choir Gaddi Frescoes

Every day I get lost in a reverie of some memory of last summer.  Lately I keep thinking of standing on the scaffolding in Santa Croce, face to face with the figures in Agnolo Gaddi’s frescos, seeing them just as they were when the artist created them in 1380. While it is unforgettable to be standing nearly 300 meters high– and I don’t like heights –in the largest Franciscan church in the world, I was distracted   from any anxiety by being mesmerized by those 600 year old faces.

The fresco itself is massive, and while its subject is the Legend of the True Cross, it is a collection of portraits of the famous – Agnolo himself, Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi (Agnolo Gaddi’s father) and ordinary contemporaries of Gaddi’s. Gaddi was a student of Giotto, and the last major artist to paint in the style of that master.  While seeing the details of the work and standing where the artist stood himself were amazing, I was arrested by the frescoes celebration of contemporary medieval life.  From Giotto forward many artists put sacred scenes in their own contemporary settings, reflecting that synthesis of the divine and the mortal that would later become known as humanism, and reminding those who gazed on them that the people who participated in these events were ordinary human beings just as they were.  As I was standing looking at Gaddi’s faces, and then back to the faces of those in our group, the same synthesis occurred to me.  The faces of the frescoes became more real because of the flesh and blood faces of the people of the people I had come to know in the last few days.  We were staring at these fresco figures and talking to one another about this small miracle, while the figures in the fresco were conversing (even the horses) and sharing the wonders of the discovery that is the subject of the scene.

Climbing down the stairs from register to register, each with a new focus was like climbing down to earth literally and metaphorically. How did those painters feel at the end of a long day’s work, weary and ready to return home to…what? My mind still wanders there.  I wonder who was the woman in the hunting hat, riding on a white horse? What preoccupied her? Was her lifelong or short? And the man in the red jerkin? Who was he in actual life? What troubled him? What gave him joy? So many human stories beyond the one the fresco tells.  That always reminds me of what is true in the fresco is true of actual life – you only get to see the face but not the story of the people you see every day. Isn’t that one of the great gifts of art?  A 600 year old fresco informs us not only of the life, ideas and sensibilities of its own time, nor does it cause us to reflect merely on our own sensibilities as individuals, or just on the “universality” of being human in its most abstract sense but it extends our imagination to think meaningfully about the  lives of those around us – those we too often see as “extras” in our own diorama rather than individuals, with their complex stories, anxieties, sorrows, and joy, who knowingly or unknowingly are our companions in our shared time of living, our shared fresco cycle that we cannot yet see.