Preparations for L’Infiorate, Spello

Saturday, 28 maggio 2005

After getting settled in our room, we wandered around the city, stopping to ask questions about the proceedings for the following days, watching the video and looking at photos of previous years. We found groups of neighbors, entire extended families busily preparing for the street paintings. Prior to this day, and throughout the previous year I imagine, they had decided on a design for their "carpet" and prepared the artwork. Some of the larger designs were plotted on a computer as a template, output to paper, stripped together and laid onto moistened streets, (sort of like you would moisten a wall for wallpaper) to be filled in with flowers in colors based on their original paintings or drawings (some considerably more complex than others). Some were simply hand-drawn with chalk on the streets that curved around the city.

Preparations included growing and gathering enormous quantities of flowers in every color of the rainbow and then snipping off the flower from the stem, pulling off all the petals and then also grinding the petals into small pieces for even more precise rendering. They had boxes of flower petals, separated by colors, in brilliant shades of reds, yellows, purples, blues, and oranges, used various herbs and vegetables for all the shades of greens they needed. Throughout the day they worked, creating their palette of colors, like pots of paint. At the same time, groups of men and boys were assembling shade structures over their "canvases" which would allow them to hang electric lights for working all night, as well as protection from wind or rain. These would be removed in the morning prior to the procession.

And so, all night long they worked, pouring petals into the templates, much the way Native American sand painters create their designs; it reminded us very much of that process. And all night long, people wandered the city, watching these carpets come to life, watching this creative process take shape, seeing the simple line drawings become elaborate depictions of man and his relation to his God and to his world. Religious themes were dominant, since after all, this is the religious celebration of Corpus Domini, but also a celebration of spring with flowers and fruit and man and his world in abstract patterns and shapes as well.

By midnight we wandered off to our room, exhausted and anticipating not getting much sleep for all the activity going on in the streets below, but not really caring!

(to be continued)