THE OUTCASTS' MADONNA - Italy
«They run and cry, they prey and scream, they crawl, implore, curse, get on their knees and go towards the altar. Once there, before the merciful Madonna of the Arco, their agitated and dramatic pilgrimage culminates. Every year, on the Mondays after Easter, it reunites a huge and thick crowd of devotees who walk barefoot along an ancient itinerary of pain that ends at Saint Mary of the Arco's sanctuary, in Sant'Anastasia, twelwe kilometers eastward from Naples.
They are the "fujenti", or the "battenti": the doleful icon's or the Virgin of the wounded face's devotees (she is perhaps one of the first Madonnas who bled).» (Marino Niola)
Who are the "battenti"? In Naples it is said that the Madonna of the Arco is the "thieves and prostitutes' Madonna". But it is quite hard to think that the 50.000 believers that every year swarm barefoot in the streets are all given to stealing or to prostitution. Surely enough, most of them "fight their own battle". The Neapolitan anthropologist Marino Niola, who studies popular forms of religiousness, reminds us that these devotees usually belong to the common people, to the lowest parts of society: the working classes, the agricultural labourers from Naples and the other Campania's districts.
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STORY DATA
Where: Sant'Anastasia - Naples (Itlay)
When: april 2001
Images : colour negative , HR and LR scans available
Text: English, French and Italian versions available on demand |
