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On the streets accompanying San Vito

One view colored through the alleys of the towered city, poetic that comes alive in the flow of tradition. In the setting, sun on the seashore, like lightning, strikes with its green ray walkers on the coast, sensitive and empathetic because it creates an unbreakable bond among people, city and history fascinating who are admiring the view. Forio is a story that runs through the streets and the banks of ancient time. Moreover, June is the most appropriate month to visit this “middle earth”, located between the capes of Punta Caruso - known as Zaro - and Punta Imperatore.

It covers 12, 85 square kilometres on the slopes of Mount Epomeo - that here is less steep than it is on the side of Casamicciola - memorable protector of this part of the island. The name of the second island city in importance and scope has all the charm of the influences that have animated it and according to some scholars derive from Fiorio, symbolizing the flourishing after the destruction of other Casali. According to others, down from Greek phoròs, ie “fertile” or most likely by chorìonie “village”.

The dialect has a difficult phonetic passing from mouth to ear satisfies the curiosity of knowledge and describes a region simply brilliant. It is Forio with its oriental flavor that retains a unique old town with typical streets, monuments, churches rich in history and the lookout towers. It has been a destination and an international center of culture and show business, from Luchino Visconti to Pier Paolo Pasolini passing by Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, Renato Guttuso, Auden and Pablo Neruda. It is also in the Abbé Alphonse Kannengiesser’s tales that in his “Souvenirs d’Italie” of 1886 describes the turmoil during the Feast of San Vito and the glance of the “vast and compact crowd of islanders” that floods the streets and “seem narrow corridors just three meters wide”. It is in these narrow streets that vitality, ‘faded’ by bustle of the world, wearing gala shades and reclaims heat and beauty belonging to it. The incredible capacity involves the traveler who has become, right now, an actor in its own right of a path that hardly will fade from his memory. The folkloric ritual of the procession celebrates the patron saint of the city, with one of the two statues of the saint, in wood, placed to the left of the altar inside the basilica dedicated to him and called “Parish” in a document of 1306 held in the Vatican. Carried on the shoulders by devotees, the exodus of human figures winds, stretches along the streets of the country, and marks the beginning of the summer season.

The other silver statue, unfortunately lock up because associated with stealing, arrived in Forio in 1787 and displayed to the public only during ceremonies. It was designed by sculptor Giuseppe Sammartino and made by goldsmiths Gennaro and Giuseppe Del Giudice. The cult of “St. Vito Martire” is part of the Catholic Church and extends up to the Orthodox Church demonstrating that, after all, also in the worship of saints, religions unite and not divide. Protector of dancers and anglers, Vito the saint was born in Sicily to be exact in Mazara Del Vallo in the third century. He was a young and fervent Christian, martyred because of his faith in 303 by the Emperor Diocletian that had him imprisoned and killed along with his tutor Modesto and his nurse Crescentia. The cult spread from Italy to other locations, up to Prague in which majestic cathedral might have kept some remains, but the bodies of the three could be buried near the town of Marigliano, identified by scholars as the oldest Marianus. On June 15, is the day of the death of young Vito, that creates and forms the link in the feeling of devotion and combines a “village festival”, with rides, stalls and music, to a common occurrence in many places in the south of Italy, through which it transmits the message of salvation.

This is the relationship between St. Vito and Forio, whose incorruptible impulse finds its roots in time. The celebrations from June 10 to 18, in as many as four days characterized by intense religious moments, mingle in the popular fair in the city center and along the coast from which they can glimpse recesses and protrusions that, again, Abbe Alphonse Kannengiesser describes as «nature, so admirable, and suddenly takes a wild and almost terrible feature». The fondness to St. Vito, of Forio, emphasizes the story in a secular report. In the Middle Ages, in fact, there was a temple in the zone of Citara. Because of the Saracen invasions, it was later built on the top of the “Casale di Forio”. Legend tells that was the Saint Child to save the country’s economy in the nineteenth century. Based on the cultivation of the vine, in that time raged the terrible late blight that provoked the scarcity of the harvest. One day a ship from Sicily, with a cargo of sulfur, moored in the harbor. The crew claimed to have been sent to Forio by a young man who pawned his ring; he asked them to heal the screws distributing the precious cargo. Obviously, the cure gave the expected results and the popular imagination identified in that young Saint Vitus of ‘Sicily’. Until 1959, the festival was held between the first and second week of August, and only in 1966, the date was changed on the day of the saint’s death, on June 15. When this day full of emotions ends, the life of the party, thanks to the committee’s responsibility to prepare the key moments, lives in the representation of the young that on a boat, accompanied by Modesto and Nurse Crescentia, arrives in Forio. Saving it. Creating a new crackdown.