Happy Easter / Buona Pasqua

Scoppio Del Carro, Firenze, 8 Aprile, 2012

(Turn up your speakers, click on the video below, and then read the rest of this posting!)

Today is Easter Sunday, and the BIG event in Firenze, other than having lunch with your family, is the “Scoppio Del Carro” which in English means the Explosion of the Cart.  It was raining this morning and I had my umbrella and I was walking to the Duomo along Via Pietrapiana and I passed a woman without an umbrella and she asked me if I was going to the Duomo?

I said “certo” (certainly!) and she hooked onto my arm because she did not want to get wet, and we walked briskly to the Cathedral, all the while having an animated conversation about Easter, the tradition of the Scoppio Del Carro, dogs, being a farmer (her, not me), where she sells her vegetables (at local markets between Firenze to Venezia, including my local market – Sant’Ambrogio) and something about her and her 7 brothers growing up on the farm (a piece of the conversation I didn’t quite catch because her accent was pretty heavy and my Italian’s not that good.)

The Cart is dead centre, just to the left of the cream-coloured building (sorry it's a bit hard to see)

Luckily the rain had stopped by the time we arrived at the side door of the Duomo, and we wished each other Buona Pasqua and in she went to catch the last few minutes of Easter Mass. I continued to a few more meters and joined 10,000 other people in the Piazza Del Duomo to watch the Scoppio Del Carro.

The tradition of the Scoppio Del Carro, like many things here, dates back several hundred years and involves 3 sacred flints brought to Florence from the first Crusade around 1,100 AD, the Pazzi family (a noble Florentine family, banished for trying to assassinate two Medici brothers), Easter Mass, and a mechanical Dove. 

To make a very long story short, during the singing of the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, the Cardinal of Firenze lights a fuse on the Dove, which travels along a wire through the Cathedral, through the front doors, and sets off a 15 minute show of fire-works, all ignited from the cart. 

If the Dove does its business correctly, tradition has it that the Fall harvest will be a good one, hence the Scoppio is watched carefully by the local farmers – my walking mate included.  The only time the Dove failed to ignite the Cart was 1966, and that was the year of the Great Flood in Firenze.

 

The Cart itself is original, so it’s about 500+ years old, and it was quite the spectacle – loud, smoky, eye-catching, and a little bit awe-inspiring to watch fireworks at 11:00am.   The Scoppio Del Carro marked the end of Lent for those that observe, and was a nice book-end for me to Carnivale in Venezia that marked the beginning of Lent.  When it was all over, the crowd disbursed, the rain started up again, and I headed home for lunch.

The Cart, fully spent - heading back to storage for another year.