TRADITIONS OF BRESCIA
The Basilisch
Andrista
5 January
It’s a rappresentation whohas like protagonist the local version of a frightening animal, the basilisk. To late evening it announced that in the forest it has been sighted this frightening monster. A group of masked captures it and they alloy it with a longest rope and drags it in country. It’s a man very disguised with capes and skins, a big cuckold head and great round eyes, that the jaw blinks noisily. The basilisk is followed from men and boys in costum boys who represent in burlesque way the several parts of the traditional family: the spouse, the spouse, the grandfather, the grandmother and other personages. After every kind of comic, the monster will be subordinate to a process in which it will be accused of every risen of crime and will pronounce its confession.
Carnival
Bagolino
Week of the carnival
In the center of the country is carried out a extraordinary carnival. The aspect more fascinating is given from ancient dances, characterized from just a name and particular steps. The dances are executed from companies of masked and dressed dancers with a traditional custom. Particular it is the decorated hat of tapes colors on which they are fixed rings, necklaces of gold lend from families friends with of the extremely precise rituals.The confection of the dressed ones and the nails head is task of the women, but they do not take part to the dances. Large shawles and the embroidered bandoleers are raised with the movements of the dancers, accompanying and amplifying their gestures. The orchestra, depositary of this list of quality and exceptional style, are constituted from violins, guitars, contrabbass and mandolin. At the same time beside this aulic ritual, in which nothing is left to the improvisation,it carries out an other, from the characteristics of all the opposite ones: here the masked ones do not follow a cerimonial; but masks and disguises ramble for the roads of the country wearing that refer to the traditional life of the peasants and the shepherds and their women.
Carnival
Pertica Alta
Carnival week
In
Pertica Alta carnival is carried out much particular one, whose main figures are characterized from the fact of being double. There is, as an example, the Old one of
Vaglio that is the mask of an old one that transport in a basket a male figure, satirical rappresentation of the state of submission of the women of mountain to their men. The mask of
Ometto of the
Gerlo represents shepherdesses that seems to transport in a basket a peasant. Around these figures others appear some like: the devil and the priest, rich and the poor one.
Procession of Valverde
Rezzano
26 July
The procession commemorates the twofold apparition of
Valverde, a leggendary event that laughed them to 1399. The legend narrates of a peasant to which Jesus, appeared without warning, ordered to throw in close small lake three breads that carried in the saddlebag. In the moment in which the peasant was about himself to obey,
Maria appeared in order to explain meant symbolic of the three breads (scarcity, plague and war) and for implore the Son revoke the order. Christ, touched from the prayers of the Mother, made launch a single bread, that one of the plague. The ceremony is divided in two parts: a procession in which girls and boys act as the traditional iconography, some know (Saint
Lucia, Sant
Elena, Saint
Rocco, Saint
Giovanni), while others interpret the Christ, the Madonna and the peasant of the legend which, in truth are represented from two various persons who walk backwards, in order not to turn the back to the two divine figures. The end of it reaches the small lake of the apparition, with a high wall and closed from an gate, and here small dumb rappresentation happens one that repeats the leggendary vicissitude. When the peasant throws the bread, manifactured according to fixed rules from the tradition, some young people are dived to swim in order to recover it, because it thinks that, being be part of the ritual action, it has acquired particular powers.
Song of the star
Treviso Bresciano and Sabbio Chiese
Epifania
The evening of the eve of
epifania a procession, preceded from three King
Magi and a tractor that a great star of illuminated paper transports, ago a turn of the country stopping itself to every house and intoned an ancient traditional song that alludes to the travel of the
Magi to
Betlemme. The group receives offered in food and money, that they are collections from a man disguised as a friar who runs up and down for the way and introduces a burlesque element in the rappresentation.
