Such a lovely mess, eh? So we’re walking down the street in Peschici on the Gargano peninsula and see this sign advertising a presepe. A presepe is a Christmas crib with an Italian twist; it features modern (or, let’s say semi-modern) Italians eating pasta and fishing and doing other things that they do—along with a traditional manger scene, of course.
The door below the sign, however is locked. It is closed for the winter. These are beach cities, after all, and if you want wall to wall people animating the city, go in August.
After a minute or so a jangle of keys breaks our silent acknowledgment of an opportunity missed. “Vorreste vederla?” a woman shouts to me. In the south, everyone’s radar is out. Would you like to see it? Why, of course we would!
It turns out that the room, as pictured above, is really an ethnographic museum, with the presepe laid out on one side of the room (you can see a corner of it on the right in the picture above), and memories of the past lining the others. I love these places. It turns out that in this small room, maybe 15 by 15 feet of space, 11 people once lived. It was owned by the mother of the woman who’d just let us in.
Kinda puts things in perspective in these troubled times.
(11 people. It’s hard to imagine. At least they had enough ladles.)