Paper short abstract:

My paper focuses on the importance and the variety the ritual processions have in many Apulian sites. They function as dramatic and symbolic practices aimed to dwell, for the time being, everyday spaces so as to make them special places where a shared sense of sacred and belonging is celebrated.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a field work I carried out in the Apulian area between 2013 and 2014, for a research project intended to collect, catalogue and archive rites, traditions, practices, stories concerning the popular festivals of the ritual year. Among the several forms of commemorating and celebrating, I draw the attention to the (religious) processional practices, both because of their pervasiveness and of their central function as symbolic means of re-shaping and re-defining the urban space, above all the communal and everyday space par excellence, the street. The latter may be regarded as a liminal chronotope (M. Bakhtin) where the inhabitants meet, confront and live day by day, but it can be also transformed, on certain occasions (I think especially of the Holy Week), into a sort of open stage temporarily and exclusively dwelt and "managed" by certain individuals and groups, chiefly the confraternities, still widespread and very active everywhere. Along the streets, these people, acting as mediators between the secular and the sacred, the worldly and the otherworldly, alternately walk/perform and stop, pray/sing and remain silent, thus giving rise to a ritual performance, a social drama (V. Turner) by which the sacred, identifying symbols (i.e. the religious images) leave their ordinary static dimension (closed in a church) to acquire an extra-ordinary dynamic, living role. Nowadays, this is still one of the major and most heartfelt means through which local communities seek both to preserve/strengthen their identity and to promote (as a tourist attraction) their cultural heritage.