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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
