Maritozzo quaresimale
Photo:italoamericano.org/
Notebook
Fr Bernard Healy
If I were to say Carnevale to you, you might think of the masked celebrations of Venice or the samba-dancing of Rio de Janeiro. However, there was once a time when Rome was also famous for its Carnevale, the festival bidding a farewell to meat before the Lenten fast.
Rome’s famous Via del Corso is so called because, for over 400 years, this street was the racecourse for the Shrove Tuesday Corsa dei Barberi – a chaotic competition where the jockey-less barbary horses of the Roman nobility were sent galloping from the Piazza del Populo, all along the mile-long street until they were re-captured at Piazza Venezia.
The rules for the race were drawn up by Pope Paul II in the 1460s, and the last race happened in 1883 when the death of a youngster who was run over led to the King of Italy banning the event.
Balcony
So important was the racing and the carnival as a whole to Rome that when Pope Alexander VII renovated the church of Santa Maria in Via Lata in the 1640s, he added a balcony above the church door so that his relatives, the Chigi family, would have a comfortable place from which to watch the festivities.
One of the best descriptions of the Roman carnival in the 19th Century can be found in Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo.
The chaos of the carnival allows the eponymous count to lure his enemies into a trap under cover of the romantic dalliances that would happen during the days of costumed celebration. Dumas vividly describes the custom of the moccoletti, the last opportunity to wear carnival costume and celebrate before the church bells marked the beginning of Lent.
As evening set in, everyone in costume carried a moccoletto, that is a lit candle, and the game was to quench the candles of others whilst keeping your own alight.
When your light was quenched, you had to remove your disguise and bring your celebration to an end. As Dumas noted, there was a lesson in this sometimes violent game: “The moccoletto is like life: man has found but one means of transmitting it, and that one comes from God. But he has discovered a thousand means of taking it away, and the devil has somewhat aided him.”
The fact that we no longer really celebrate Carnevale is an indication that Lent itself has lost some of its punch”
These days the famous Carnevale has dwindled away to almost nothing. You see a few children dressed in costume on the streets of Rome, but the old celebrations are long gone.
Whilst we have no need for the debauchery the carnival once gave cover to, the fact that we no longer really celebrate Carnevale is an indication that Lent itself has lost some of its punch.
There is also something in the ideal of the Carnevale that was worth celebrating. If, for a few days, the poor could dress like princes and the lords could pass for peasants, one could see in the celebration a reminder of the Gospel message of a God who “casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly”.
Here in Ireland we celebrate Shrove Tuesday by eating pancakes. The original reason for this was to use up those ingredients that were forbidden under the old Lenten fasting regulations.
Here in Rome we do something similar, but the process takes a lot longer! From about the beginning of February, cafés have been selling two traditional pre-Lenten delicacies designed to use up stocks of butter, eggs and sugar.
Frappe are crispy fried sheets of dough coated in sugar, whilst castagnole (little chestnuts) are small sugar-coated dough-balls that can be consumed in a single mouthful. Once Lent comes around, the traditional pastry is the maritozzo quaresimale (Lenten Maritozzo), a confection with a passing resemblance to a hot-cross bun. To respect the Lenten fast, this kind of bun is sweetened, not with sugar, but with raisins and dried fruit.
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And on that subject…
Speaking of pastries, many of my readers will have heard of the famous Cornelius (Connie) Lucey who was Bishop of Cork from 1952 to 1980.
It is said that during the times of strict Lenten fasting that he told his flock that they could have a biscuit or two with their tea in the morning and still respect the rules of the fast.
Needless to say, the bakers of Cork weren’t long in seeing a loophole, and thus was born the Connie Dodger – an outsized hybrid between a biscuit and a bun that afforded substantial nourishment but claimed to stay within the letter of the law.