A Recipe for a Feast

A couple of weeks ago, in Jessup, Pennsylvania—the small town next to my boyhood hometown—crowds of people gathered to celebrate the annual “Race of the Saints,” called in Italian La Corsa dei Ceri, “the Race of the Candles,” because that is what the structures the racers carried look like. You must imagine, set and pegged upright each on its own wide and sturdy platform of wooden beams, three candle-like pedestals as tall and thick as tree-trunks, surmounted by the images of three saints, George, Anthony, and the bishop Ubaldo.

These platforms weigh about 450 pounds, so you need a team of men to hoist them up on their shoulders, and then to race through the town, up and down the steep streets, while the people associated with each team cheer them on. Of course, the teams must be distinguished by festive garb, bright yellow-gold for Ubaldo, blue for George, and black for Anthony. Since it’s Saint Ubaldo’s feast day, his team must always “win,” but there’s still plenty of competition to see which team makes its way almost to the goal, and which team manages to get the “candles” pegged to the platform first and raised up high.

Why Ubaldo? He was the heroic and saintly bishop of the mountain city of Gubbio, near to Assisi in Umbria, in the twelfth century. Ubaldo was a peace-loving man, shy and retiring, modest in his garb and manner of life, solicitous for the welfare of the poor; but he it was who led the Eugubini (believe it or not, that’s what you call people who live in Gubbio) in battle against an alliance of nearby cities that had attacked them. When he died, the people venerated him as a saint, and to this day you can view his body in a chapel to which it was transferred four hundred years after his death. I have seen it. It lies in a glass coffin, and the flesh is incorrupt, though stretched taut above the bones.

So the good people of Gubbio have held, for centuries, this same race of the saints, though in Italy the candles weigh about 900 pounds, and the right to be a member of one of the teams is considered a family honor, passed down from fathers to sons. Thousands and thousands throng the streets of Gubbio for the race, in a city-wide festival of piety, tradition, old-fashioned boyish rivalry, feasting, and song. You may then ask why this same feast should be celebrated across the ocean, in Jessup.

Here we encounter something unthinkable now—at least in America, and I hope I do not speak for Italy also. The people of Gubbio define themselves by their city. They love the place; they honor their patron; they celebrate their feasts; they know their neighbors; and their neighbors, after all, are probably their kinsmen too, though it might take a genealogist to trace two neighboring streams back to their originating source. When the Eugubini emigrated to America, they did not scatter themselves across the continent. What would have been the good of that? Why would they have wanted to do so? The first of them settled in Jessup, to work in the coal mines, and they drew all their kin and neighbors to Jessup after them. Other than the mountainous terrain, there was nothing in Jessup that was like Gubbio. After all, in my own town, Archbald, the Italians emigrated not from Gubbio but from Tiriolo, in Calabria, several hundred miles away.

So then, when the Eugubini came to Jessup, they brought their feast with them, beginning in 1909, though by 1952 it had fallen into abeyance. What brought it back was the surge of traditional feeling that came with the American bicentennial in 1976. That year was the centennial for both Archbald and Jessup, as each borough had been incorporated in 1876. I was a junior in high school then, and my family and I took some part in the big town parade on July 4; the ladies dressed in old-fashioned costumes, and a lot of the men grew beards. But two miles away, some of the elderly Italians got the idea of having the great Race again, and it has continued—with some lapses—ever since.

It seems to me that to conceive of such a feast in the first place, three things are essential. They are related. The first is neighborhood born of a felt kinship. I use the word neighborhood in its original sense, when it named not a geographical area but a virtue, that of being a good neighbor—a short step away from brotherhood. I fear that this may be hard to explain to people who did not grow up with something near to my 39 first cousins, or to my wife’s 43, most of whom we saw quite a lot of, played ball with, rode bicycles with, ate with on a Sunday at our grandparents’ house, went to school with, or to church. In both Italian towns, it was as it was also in those Pennsylvania towns, that your neighbors are your cousins, or your cousin’s cousins, or cousins to your cousin’s neighbor, and that means that you all fit in somehow, and there are no real strangers, at least not after you say your name.