Art & Culture, Blog, PugliaByMe, Traditions
Cartapesta: Lecce's Artistic Legacy
Discovering the old tradition of Cartapesta in Lecce with Victoria | #PugliaByMe A craft very unique to Lecce in the Salento region of Puglia is cartapesta, papier-mâché. No, not the papiermâché you did in elementary school… papier-mâché as an art form! In fact, especially here in Lecce you will find many spectacular statues and even a ceiling in one of the churches is actually papier-mâché e! And trust me, you would never suspect it unless it was pointed out to you! Cartapesta – Origins or Necessity is the Mother of Creativity! Although the origins of papier-mâché are in the Middle and Far East, through trade the technique found its way…
Local Celebrations: Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Ruvo di Puglia Carnival 2014
The path towards the Passion: the Holy Thursday and the Altars of Repose Today, the 17th of April 2014, all the devoted people will visit the churches and stop in front of the Last Supper to commemorate the
The Quarantane: Old popular tradition in Puglia
Let's celebrate Carnival at Orsara di Puglia
A little altar for St Joseph
An old Puglian tradition to celebrated St Joseph On the 19th of March the Church commemorates Saint Joseph, Jesus' putative father. Every year, in the little towns that surround Bari, people organize bonfires in honour of the beloved Saint.
Popular Celebrations
With the season of Lent, which starts on Ash Wednesday and covers a period of approximately six weeks before Easter Day, some villages in Puglia celebrate the ancient popular tradition of the Quarantane.
Fires of St Joseph
In the period just before the celebration of St. Joseph, in Puglia it is not unusual to come across groups of young people collecting wood pruning of olive trees and vines f in the countryside. This sets the beginning
Whether you are looking for a traditional religious celebration, a remake of a historic event, a celebration of harvest time and local food production (called sagre) or you simply want to enjoy a good festival and have fun, then Puglia has lots to offer all year round.
Trabucchi of Gargano
Putignano Carnival
The Putignano Carnival is one of the biggest Carnivals in Italy and is also the longest and one of the oldest carnival in the world. It has in fact very old origins (few records date this event back to the 26th of December 1394) and it still retains few traditional rites such as the "Feste delle Propaggini", "Festa dell'Orso" (The Feast of the Bear), the "Burial of Carnival". The "Rito della Propaggine" signs the beginning of the carnival and is a celebration of the event that gave birth to the carnival on the 26th of December 1394 when the Holy Remains of St. Steven Protomartyrs were transferred from Monopoli to…
The Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio defined these weird constructions as…"strange fishing machines, all composed of planks and beams similar to giant spiders". This colorful description perfectly describes the trabucco, a funny wooden structure which will definitely attracts your attention when you visit the Gargano Promontory as it is typical of its coastline, especially between Vieste and Peschici. The origins of the trabucco are still a little bit uncertain: most of the historians agree that this machine and the related fishing technique were invented by the Phoenicians and it made its first appearance in Puglia during the 18th century. Pretty soon the trabucco became a popular way of catching fish as…