Shoulder-borne machines, saints, and things carried at a run

Campanian festivals have one distinguishing feature: you do not watch them standing still, you carry them. The great shoulder-borne machines are wooden structures as tall as buildings, lifted and made to dance by teams of hundreds of men, and since 2013 they have been on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage.

The lilies of Nola

They are eight wooden obelisks twenty-five metres tall, plus a boat, carried on the shoulders of teams of a hundred and twenty through the streets of Nola at the end of June. Each weighs around two and a half tonnes. Anyone who comes across it by chance struggles to believe what they are seeing: it is not a procession, it is a feat of collective balance.

The other machines

The same tradition exists elsewhere in different forms: the Varia of Palmi in Calabria is one of the sister festivals recognised alongside the lilies. In Campania there are also the carts of Macerata Campania for Sant'Antuono in January, made of barrels and instruments that are beaten, and the flower battles that close the summer in the province of Salerno.

San Gennaro

In Naples the calendar turns on three dates (the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, 19 September and 16 December) on which the rite of the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro is repeated in the cathedral. Believe it or not, what you see is an entire city stopping to wait for news.

A summer of village fairs

From July to September every village has one, and the calendar is built around produce: mozzarella near Caserta, tomatoes in the Nocera countryside, chestnuts and truffles in Irpinia in October, blue fish in the ports of the Cilento. They are street festivals, you eat standing up and you spend little.

Dates move from year to year and often to the nearest weekend. It is worth asking at the campsite or at the town's tourist office: this is information that circulates locally more than online.