Celebrating The Feast Of The Annunciation In Florence

Annunciation

Disclosure: This article may contain links to products or services (including Amazon) that pay me a small commission. This is at no extra cost to you.

25 March is historically the start of the New Year in Florence. It is also the day on which the archangel Gabriel announced the incarnation to the Virgin Mary. The Feast of the Annunciation is one of the lesser known of Italy’s numerous religious festivals, hardly mentioned in the guidebooks. I’d been to something similar in the village of Vico del Gargano in Puglia, but was surprised to find so few visitors at a feast in a major tourist destination. When I visited a few years ago there were no other tourists around.

Feast Of The Annunciation

It was a wet Thursday morning and people were scuttling to work as normal, dodging the motorcycles and the raindrops in the narrow Florentine streets. Yet in the Piazza SS Annunziata the Festival of the Annunciation was already in full swing, the stalls set up and the visitors tucking into a second breakfast of sausages, panini or even freshly roasted pig.

The square was full of market stalls, selling toys and household items, bric-a-brac and rugs.  There was also a brisk trade in umbrellas! But it was the sweet stalls which were the most plentiful, and the air was already heavy with the scent of croccante and brigidini.

Market stall selling sweets at the Feast of the Annunciation
Market stall laden with sweets

Tuscan Brigidini

Brigidini are a Tuscan speciality, a sort of round yellow wafer made with eggs and sugar and flavoured with aniseed. According to tradition, they were first made by nuns of the Brigidine order. In the time of St Brigid they were made by hand, one at a time, but now special machines are used. I watched for a while as a stallholder fed the yellow paste into one end of the machine and the biscuits flew rapidly out of the other. He pressed a free sample on me: it was warm, sweet and fragrant. However, I chose to buy the croccante, a kind of sticky nut brittle which proved to be very tasty.    

Pinnable image of the Feast of the Annunciation and a man producing the brigadini
Pinnable image of the Feast of the Annunciation and producing the brigadini

The anteroom to the church was full of stalls, too, but of a different kind, a reminder that this is primarily a religious festival. Here they were selling rosaries, prayer books, and icons. By the door the ladies of the Servi di Maria had a stall piled high with homemade oven gloves and teatowels.

A Religious Celebration

The basilica itself was packed to overflowing for the ten o’clock mass, one of several services that would take place during the day. The interior was ablaze with the light of hundreds of candles and the air was thick with incense. The worshipping crowd murmured Ecco signore at regular intervals, but at the back of the church people were coming and going, joining in sporadically, talking in small groups or greeting friends.

LivItaly have a whole range of small group tours throughout Italy. Readers of this site can get a 5% discount on all of their tours by using discount code BEWITCHEDBYITALY

A typically Italian footnote was the exhibition of sacred art in a side room. In these modern portrayals of the Annunciation Gabriel was variously brightly coloured, demonic, male or female. He (or she) was at times threatening, but elsewhere approached Mary in an attitude of female solidarity. Where they all differed from classical interpretations, however, was in the lack of Tuscan landscape backgrounds.

As I turned to go people were still arriving, swarming into the church or picking over the market stall wares. But this is strictly an occasion for the locals and there were still no other tourists in sight.

Read more about the city of Florence: What To See And Do In Florence.

About Bewitched by italy

Bewitched By Italy is owned and managed by Karen Warren.

I have been writing and travelling for many years (almost 70 countries at the last count), but Italy remains one of my favourite destinations. This website is my attempt to inform and inspire other travellers, and to share some of the things I’ve discovered along the way. Read more…

FOLLOW ME

Buy Me A Coffee

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *