London’s Italian Festival

It always surprises me how few Londoners seem to know about one of the capital’s largest religious events, and one that has been taking place since 1883. I think I only discovered it in the 1990s; certainly the first time I photographed it I did so mainly on black and white film, despite it being a very colourful event.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

It has changed a little over the years. The first processions  I photographed went to the south of the Italian Church on Clerkenwell Rd, going through the narrower streets around Hatton Garden. Now the route sticks to the major roads in a triangular route to the north. When this started – and as a Catholic procession it had to get a special dispensation from Queen Victoria, and was the first Catholic procession in England since the reformation – this area of London was ‘Little Italy’, packed with small slum streets, homes and workshops for the many Italians in the city, most of whom had fled from Italy in the political upheavals of the early and mid-nineteenth century. These Italian patriots were welcomed in London – Garabaldi got a hero’s welcome when he visited in 1864, and Giuseppe Mazzini, the ‘Beating Heart of Italy’ and one of the first true Europeans spent several periods of exile in the city.

Pathe News filmed the event in 1927, and the streets were much more crowded then, but the event looks quite similar, although of course then it was ‘in’ black and white and without sound. I did think of using the movie facility on my new D800, but I was just too busy taking still images, and you can’t really do both at the same time. The clip only shows some statues being carried around and also a very large phalanx of first communicants in white dresses.  I think the floats with the bibilical tableaux are probably a rather more recent addition.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

Now the Italians have largely moved out of the area, and the new arrivals from Italy in the twentieth century went were there was better housing and work. Many of the streets of Little Italy were cleared and replaced by social housing around the start of the 20th century, and others now house large and mainly modern offices. But St Peter’s Italian Catholic Church, consecrated in 1863, remains, serving an Italian-speaking community that mainly comes in from the suburbs. For a period during the war, when Italians in this country were interned it became an Irish church, but in 1963 went back to its Italian past.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

As well as the procession there are also services going on in the church beforehand, but more interesting to me, a great deal of excellent Italian food and wine down the hill behind the church in the Sagra (local fair or festival) and I took a few pictures there, particularly of the dancing, though working with two cameras while holding a plastic cup of red wine proved tricky. It’s really the kind of event where a small, unobtrusive camera such as a Leica would be more useful; I’d thought of bringing the Fuji X100, but my bag was already heavy enough.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

One of the highlights of the event is the release of doves. Apparently this happens at both the start and the finish of the procession, with 3 white doves at each. The doves are well-trained by the White Dove Company and fly back home to Loughton, but they could be better trained for the benefit of photographers. This year two flew up faster than a Lockheed SR-21 while the third declined to leave Padre Carmelo di Giovanni’s hands. But this isn’t the kind of thing you can plan much for, and this year I was taken slightly by surprise – I think Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Antonio Mennini rather jumped the gun.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

I did rather better in 2009 and you can see the release there in my post The Unpredictability of Doves (and more pictures from the 2009 procession have really been on-line for some time) but 2007 was my best year of all, when the doves performed with much greater precision as the crop below shows – more about this, the entire image and another not so good example in Pigeons Post.

© 2007, Peter Marshall

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