Pagani

In Pagani, a small town near Pompei, seven days after Easter, people celebrate The Lady of the Hens, a Virgin celebrated with ancestral dances and songs. For thirty days the devout people yove as one in order to perpetrate the Tradition, an event in which all the population participate animated by a faith that becomes memory and transcendence. Fonzino leads the devotees in preparing the Tosello, a little secret baroque temple, that every year is shown to the community the day of the celebration. The wait for the Madonna marks the days preceding the celebration, between the fields’ sowing and the recurrence of folk rituals that mark the moment of transition from a season to another one. Until the day of the Feast, when everything melts into a riot of music and dance in order to achieve a catharsis and the birth of a new springtime.