Europe 24 - Ruoti, Day 2

Some days are best started slowly.

We didn’t have anything we needed to do in Ruoti until the early afternoon and we thought about filling that time with activities and excursions but after some reflection it seemed that the better course of action would be to spend the morning not doing much of anything at all. Our B&B in Avigliano was pretty well suited for that, it turned out.

If you went out toward the little area where the cars were parked and turned left and down a small hill you found yourself by a pool that was about a meter and a half deep and lined with canvas rather than concrete. Kim and I hung out there for a while – sometimes in the water, and sometimes just sitting in the shaded area off to the side, watching the clouds go by and not doing much of anything. There was a father with his son who would go in the water when we weren’t in, and after they left a couple of teenagers showed up and did much the same things we did only on the other side of the place and accompanied by fairly loud but enjoyable music. It was a nice way to ease into the day.

Oliver, for his part, found where the hammocks were located and spent his time there.

Eventually we decided that it was time to drive over to Ruoti so we headed out along the SP6 and SS7 roads, having learned that lesson the previous day. We knew where the correct parking lot was as well, so we had it all planned out.

And then we ran smack into the Festival of San Donato, one of the two patron saints of Ruoti. We knew this was coming, of course. We’d scheduled our visit to be there for at least the first day of it after all. But it was a bit of a surprise to see what it meant in practice.

Ruoti basically shuts down for this festival. Certainly the main street through town does, anyway, and we found ourselves detoured east around the town on some fairly small and hilly roads that slowly curved back toward the main street except that we chose the wrong fork at the very end and ended up coming back onto the main street slightly inside of the barricaded area so we had to negotiate our way around all of the vendors who were still setting up their wares. Fortunately it was still early – the Festival didn’t technically start until 5pm and we got there around 2ish – and the streets were relatively empty otherwise, so after some bobbing and weaving we emerged on the other side of the barricades and parked next to an apartment building, hoping that was a legal spot.

The vendor area is much like you’d see in any civic festival across the world, with sellers who work the festival circuit setting up their goods for this one after taking them down not long ago from the last one somewhere else and getting ready to entice the crowds into spending some money so they can move on to the next one. Many of the vendors were African, dressed in colorful flowing shirts, and there was quite a variety of stuff on offer though we didn’t end up buying anything. Carry-on luggage can only hold so much, after all.

We walked up the main street for a while and then decided to go up to the old part of town again, just kind of seeing what was there to see. It’s a lovely place.

We even found a reminder of the previous day’s events and took pictures with it.

After a while we started to get hungry and went back down to the main street to search for lunch, but we had mostly missed our window for that. The Festival booths didn’t open until later, and nothing in Italy is open in the mid-late afternoon anyway. You learn quickly in Italy that if you want to buy anything – pretty much anything at all – you should get it before 2pm or after 4pm. So our timing wasn’t the best but here we were. And you do find some interesting things if you look around.

This place wasn’t serving at the time, but I have to say I’d have eaten there if they were. It’s always interesting to see what other cultures think of your own. I can’t say that I’d ever considered the idea of American cowboys eating döner kebab, but you know, there’s nothing that says they didn’t do that and it really is good food after all. I rather like the idea of Chet and Dusty out on the prairie with a block of meat slowly turning in the ol’ covered wagon, flatbreads at the ready, and I will incorporate that into my vision of the Old West from now on.

In the end we found a little café that was open and we managed to get a small but tasty lunch, the best part of which actually was this soda. Let me tell you, this stuff rocked.

Felice and Rosario caught up with us at the café, after which Felice took us on a whirlwind tour of several of his museums, all of which were devoted to the history of Italian journalism. It turns out that Renato Angiolillo, one of the titans of 20th-century Italian newspaper publishing, was born in Ruoti and Felice is working to preserve his legacy there. Two of the museums were basically archives, with complete runs of bound volumes of many different newspapers. We found the issues from our birthdays in some of them and paged through books of others. There was also a museum that housed some old hand-operated printing presses and the typefaces that were used on them. It was absolutely fascinating, and we enjoyed it immensely.

Felice gave Oliver an “O” from one of the typesets, which was very generous of him, and he sent me away with two books as well – one a dictionary of the Ruotese dialect, which was the book they were using for that contest at lunch the previous day, and the other a thick reference book of genealogical material from Ruoti going back centuries, a gold mine for someone looking into their family history here. These were thoughtful gifts and graciously given! The books are in front of me on my desk as I type this, reminders of the kindness and generosity of someone now very far away.

Felice had to leave us to give another visitor a tour of the surrounding countryside, so we walked down to La Chiesa di San Vito, which is in a little park off the main street. It’s a pretty church and much more modern than La Chiesa Madre di San Nicola – for all its history people live in Ruoti and go about their lives today, after all – and the crowd slowly gathered for the Festival of San Donato.

We even ran into Rosario there, which was lovely. He was with a French friend who was there for the festival as well.

The main event of this festival, as far as we were concerned, was the procession of the icon of San Donato. The icon is about five or six feet tall and has a very worried expression on its face, and after a while you understand why because what happens is that they put it on a bier and then a rotating crew of six men at a time carry it through the streets of Ruoti – down the main street, up the mountain, down the mountain, through the town and back to the church where it started, and every so often they stop and the crew rotates out and a different six men carry it for a while and some of those transitions can be a bit tricky. There were no women on the crew that I saw, though perhaps in other years there are. There is nothing like this in the US – not that I know of, anyway – and it was something that we wanted to see and take part in.

The icon emerged out of the church at more or less the appointed time and moved slowly across the park with the town marching band trailing behind it and then the rest of us filling in after them.

From there it moved south down the main road, with the priest in front calling out something in Italian – a blessing? an exhortation? directions? – every minute or two over a microphone attached to a small amp that someone else was carrying. We were generally close enough to hear him over the band, but not always.

At this point there was a bit of a wobble as the next crew took over, but the icon was quickly righted and we were off again.

The icon proceeded toward the southern edge of town before making a U-turn and returning along a raised area back the way we came, and we followed along as a cheerful mob while the band played ahead. The thing you have to understand about this festival is that it was, well, festive. People were having a good time. It was not a solemn trudge. The crowd was chatting and enjoying the scenery and greeting each other with exclamations and hugs and really that’s what festivals should be like.

The next stage of this procession entailed heading up the switchback road to the Piazza Ponte, where we’d had lunch the day before, and this is where the procession started losing people because it’s a long way up to the Piazza and not everyone wants to do that. Kim headed back to the little park at this point, but Oliver and I decided that if we were going to do this we were going to do the whole thing so we stayed with the crowd and started up.

 

 

 

 

It’s quite a climb up to the Piazza Ponte, even if you’re not carrying a large brass instrument, but we made it up to the top and then had a bit of a breather while they conducted a short ceremony before moving on.

From here it was a long, slow march through much of the rest of town – mostly but not entirely downhill, and through areas I’d not seen before. It took a while because nobody was in much of a hurry and there were the frequent breaks to change out the icon crew, and the atmosphere remained pretty happy the whole time.

I think my favorite photo of this whole thing was this one, as we worked our way down the mountain toward the main street. It just seems to capture the feeling of the thing in a way that is hard to define.

Eventually we found our way back to the little park in front of the church, and there were a few announcements and whatnot and then it was over and the party could begin.

There was a band playing, and the park was full of people just hanging around. We waved at Katya and her husband over on the other side of the park, and acquired more of the bergamot soda that was so good at lunch.

At one point Enzina came over to ask if the keychain that she’d found belonged to us, but as far as we could tell it didn’t – the rental company certainly didn’t think so the next day – and afterward, thanks to Google Translate, we had a lovely conversation.

Eventually Felice returned from his tour and we caught up for a bit before saying our goodbyes and promising to be in touch.

We took our time walking down the street past the vendors, just letting the festival flow over us for a while as we made our way back to the car.

Figuring out how to get back around Ruoti with the main road blocked off was a bit of a trick but we managed it and then we were on our way back to Avigliano where we packed for the next day’s travels and watched the closing few minutes of the Olympic broadcast.

It is a lovely thing to be welcomed into a community and to take part, however briefly, in the life of the place. Ruoti will always hold a place in our hearts and I look forward to returning someday.