Memories and Holidays : The Presepio

Everyone who celebrates Christmas has Christmas memories.  Mine go back more than 40 years and are nearly all memories in Rome. And most of them involve the presepio.

Unwrapping the presepio returns me to being little, with the presepio world before me.

Since Naples was in the 18th century — when the presepio concept first developed — a thriving international port, the manger scene also includes an exotic mix of visitors – Africans, Arabs and Orientals – as found in the teaming streets of Naples itself.  Also many animals and accessories including musical instruments, farm and household implements, fruit and vegetables, dishes and pottery, and baskets.

A whole presepio world.  That same world that drew me in as a small child.

When I open the presepio boxes some time every December, first I must build mountains out of encyclopedias and paperback books, and rivers from tinkling foil.  I must make hills for camels and sheep to wander down.

I must shake out the ancient damask that is the floor (much patched, much stained from fountains that dribbled onto it over the decades.)  I must hang the eight angels (made by four different hands, and from 1926 to 2001.)

I check to ensure that the tiny aquarium pumps are still working well on the two-spouted fountain, that the wine-makers cask’s (where the “wine” runs red as it is cranberry juice) and that the bulbs are still operative in the trattoria.

I must think about presepi of years past — look at some of the illustrations tucked into one box, made by my mother: ”particularly effective this year” penciled on a rough drawing of a presepio set-up she made and especially approved of one year.

Our presepio survived, as did many of those of my mother’s childhood, because someone wrapped each figure, mummy style, in soft paper, swaddling delicate fingers and tiny toes, wings and hoofs, cabbages and fish, in protection, and then wrapped that little bundle in paper towels or newspapers.

When my daughter was four she made for Jesus a teddy bear like her own and that was the size of a sheep.  We have that too, but at nine, she will not allow it to come out (‘it is embarrassing” she says to me this evening, as she stacks more mozzarella nearly into a minute basket,)

This gives me the same enjoyable shiver of disgust I suspect I felt when I first was allowed to help with the presepio, and arrange the tiny gifts. There is a mound of presents strewn round the baby’s crib — pizza, oranges, fish, garlic, tomatoes, and everything else a Neapolitan would think to bring as a heartfelt gift.

An aunt I loved died this autumn. Her adored presepio figures, collected in Rome by my uncle when I was a little girl, bring 16 new people to this year’s presepio.  It is very good to have two egg sellers, one in a yellow frock and another in a blue one, both with delicate fingers holding up a small perfect egg that they hope a presepio passerby will purchase.

Some of the cardinal figures — Jesus, Mary and Joseph — are allowed out only every second year as they have doubles — those from my mother’s childhood, in the 1920s and 30s, and from my own, in the ’60s,  This year we decided to put in four kings — two old ones, two from the 1960s.

The camels are a mix of old and new.

My other aunt visited last week.  She has been setting up presepi — including some of the same figures that were here — for more than 80 years.

It filled my heart with the sweet, comforting warmth of continuity to watch her with my children puttering away among the market figures, intent on arranging a scene that she too has been playing in her head for decades (she has her own similar Neapolitan presepio too.)

“You really need to enter into it and think what would be realistic”, she reminds me, as she unwraps from an ageless tissue paper a tiny hammer and places it in the hands of the coppersmith.

She moves him a bit away from the cobbler.

“Too much noise to have them working so closely together”.

When the presepio is put away — tradition says on February 2 though we sometime put it away sooner or later — a little piece of me disappears into the presepio boxes.

There is not much I love more than the presepio, which in its high level of artisanship, its celebration of markets and family and food and socialization — encompasses most of the Italian features I hold most dear.  I will think about it for the rest of the year, considering modifications (or not) for the scene on the following Christmas, and keep an eye out for the odd tiny object — one never know where things may pop up — that might make a good addition.  Like two bunches of Puglia wild oregano which this year are perfect umbrella pines.

What will next year bring to the ongoing and quite magic world of presepio ?

Tanti auguri

Marjorie