Today is January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. This is the official end of Christmastide in the liturgical calendar, when the Magi or Three Kings were supposed to have visited the baby Jesus.
Back in November in Naples, we saw a lot of nativity scenes just starting to be prepared in churches. The one shown here is permanently on display in the Chiesa de Santa Chiara, and it is huge. It also illustrates how the central scene of Mary, Joseph and the baby in a crib becomes elaborated to include not only a star, angels, humble shepherds, and exotic wise men…
but also townspeople and peasants, doing various tasks; animals, buildings, grottos and mountains…
…and even some wealthy landowners with their cows and pigs.
While churches and municipalities construct their own nativity scenes — the Vatican has a huge one in St. Peter’s Square that changes every year; recently they built one in the shape of a boat that had to do with immigration crisis — it’s also a family tradition. There’s nowhere better than Naples for finding everything you need to make or add to your family’s own presepe.
The shops that sell these figures, backgrounds, trees and shrubs, and everything else for making your own nativity scene were in full swing when we were there, and I found them amazing. The enclosures for staging your scene ranged from very small to quite imposing, and they are not cheap. In addition to endless variations of the main elements from the religious story, you can add figures that represent particular professions, crafts, hobbies, and passions, and now some of these are even mechanized. There’s a whole street devoted to such shops, called the Via San Gregorio Armeno, but we saw similar shops scattered all over the city.
I have a nativity scene that my mother and I made from terracotta clay we dug ourselves, back in the 1960s. It’s very simple, quite naive, and precious to me, but many years (this was one of them) I don’t even get it out. My life will not be long enough to collect and outfit an entire Italian presepe, but if I had known about this earlier, I might have tried — few could fail to be enchanted by the ingenuity and humor and sense of personal participation in the Christmas story that they represent.