San Donnino part 1: Fidenza unleashed

Every year Fidenza marks October 9, the feast day of San Donnino, with a multi-day festa. We were last here for this event in 2018, and were amazed at how big a deal it was. The party for the town's patron saint was at least five days long, with additional events days before that, and what seemed like the whole population turned out to eat and drink and cram together to joyfully scream at each other over booming pop music late into the night. Our friends told us that San Donnino is bigger than Liberation Day, bigger than Christmas, the most significant public holiday on the town's busy calendar. And our street in the center of town is also the epicenter of the festivities.

Last year, with fear of COVID keeping everyone cowering behind their own doors, we were stuck in California and in Fidenza the festa was sadly truncated. There were a handful of art exhibits, a couple of outdoor talks and tours, a few food booths in an outdoor space where only a limited number of people--masked, of course--could be at any one time. It was hardly San Donnino at all.

In 2021, despite the threat of COVID still hanging over us all, people--particularly younger people--were ready to let loose again. And although this year's festa was shorter (the meat of it was really only three days long), smaller (with many fewer booths selling food, drink, and tat of various kinds), mostly outdoors, and strictly controlled (at least in theory), the party, while it lasted, was quite the bacchanal. 

This year's theme was the environment and climate change, always a major concern of the town's center-left government. To that end, a forest--a temporary and very tidy forest--was summoned into existence in the town's main square. A crew quickly rolled out sod to cover one end of the piazza and unloaded dozens of trees and plants.

The festa officially opened on the evening of Thursday, October 7, with a ceremony in the Piazza Grande at the other end of our street. We strolled down to watch, but after 45 minutes of speeches from the mayor, other officials, and a local priest we got tired of waiting for something to happen and went off to get ice cream. We later learned, from the mayor's Instagram account, that we'd missed seeing various people juggle flaming torches and light fountains of kerosene. I'm not sure exactly how that jibes with the environmental angle, but it looked pretty spectacular.

One thing that often strikes me when I'm here is how fuzzy the boundary is between government and the Catholic church, or at least the church's less institutional, more folkloric aspects. The festa is an unabashedly religious observance, complete with a special mass in the cathedral, and in addition to pyromania the opening event included a procession with banners emblazoned with a bevy of Catholic martyrs. Yet this party in honor of a Catholic saint is also an entirely civic event which welcomes atheists, Muslims, fallen-away Catholics and everyone else to participate--and with no evangelizing. I wouldn't want to see anyone's religion become part of our civic life in the U.S., but the Italians' willingness to deal with these contradictions in a spirit of lasciare andare--letting it go--seems charmingly on brand to me, particularly at a time when some of my fellow Americans are consumed with shoving their religion (or hatred of religion) down one another's throats.

On Friday afternoon loud music began pumping out of big loudspeakers in the center of the piazza, mostly American oldies interspersed with a few Italian chestnuts. In other neighboring piazzas other loudspeakers played competing music, and occasionally a live (and not wildly talented) band popped up. As afternoon turned into evening the volume rose. By 10 pm we could clearly hear every word of every familiar tune through our closed double-glazed windows. Amid all this, the forest, by now up and running, wasn't a particularly tranquil spot.

Selfies, anyone?

But the rest of our street was even less so. The bars' outdoor tents were crowded with people who were clearly thrilled to finally be all together again. The street outside our front door was almost impassable.

Che bella figura!

The stalls lining the other half of the piazza were selling beer and wine, cheese and sausage, and the official pasta of this holiday, anolini in brodo--little round Parmesan-and-breadcrumb ravioli in broth--at a terrific clip. And of course everyone was yelling at the top of their lungs to be heard over the music.

All eating, all drinking.

We retreated to our apartment and watched the final episodes of a silly Italian detective show, turning up the volume so we could hear the (mostly incomprehensible) dialogue over the roar from outside. The bar across the street, La Strega, where we often go for a morning coffee, attracts a young crowd in the evenings and usually plays loud music until about midnight on weekends. But during San Donnino it's  city loudspeakers that are booming out the hits of yesteryear, and when I fell asleep at around 12:30 the music was still going at top volume. Luckily, our bedroom is on the courtyard side of the apartment, but I felt sorry for our neighbors who aren't so lucky.

I woke up a little before 4 am, as I often do, and could hear that the party wasn't over. The music wasn't as loud, but someone still had a loudspeaker going. Peeking out our front windows, I could see that the bar was closed but thirty or forty people were still out in the street, talking, laughing, dancing, and embracing each other. If I had to guess I'd say they were pretty drunk, but they also seemed very happy. The street was a mess, though, with cigarette butts, discarded paper anolini cartons, and other trash strewn about. I went back to bed and fell asleep wondering whether Fidenza would have the stamina for another two nights of this.