Boston is home to one of the largest historic Italian enclaves in the country. The North End, a one-square-mile neighborhood that hugs the city’s harbor, was the settling place for hundreds of southern Italian immigrants who escaped high mortality rates, poverty, disease, and famine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And while traces of these immigrants persist in the neighborhood’s Italian bakeries, restaurants, delis, and coffee shops, the North End’s Italian character is at its strongest during the month of August, locally dubbed as “feast season.” Every weekend during this last month of summer, the neighborhood celebrates the handful of saints its descendants brought over more than a century ago. For four days, between Thursdays and Sundays, each saint is honored with religious processions, marching bands, live music, fireworks, games, and food stands selling Italian classics like cannoli, calamari, meatballs, ravioli, Italian sausage, and more.
These festivals are an opportunity for the neighborhood’s Italian Americans to renew their faith in their patron saints, honor their heritage, and spend time with family and friends. They are celebrations that carry on regardless of incremental weather and have only been suspended due to major worldwide events such as World War II and the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The neighborhood has been subject to waves of gentrification over the decades, which has prevented locals from celebrating all the religious icons their ancestors initially brought over, four main saints are still celebrated with vigor: Saint Agrippina di Mineo; Madonna della Cava, Madonna del Soccorso di Sciacca, and Saint Anthony of Padua.
Saint Agrippina di Mineo
The festival of Saint Agrippina di Mineo kicks off the North End’s feast season during the first weekend of August. According to Christian legend, Saint Agrippina was the beautiful, young daughter of a nobleman who was tortured to death by the Roman emperor Valerian in 256 A.D. She is now the patron saint of thunderstorms, leprosy, and evil spirits, hailing from the remote Sicilian town of Mineo. Celebrated in the North End since 1914, the statue of Saint Agrippina is the heaviest of the neighborhood saints. Housed in an ornate canopy, the statute weighs a staggering 2,000 pounds and is carried in a procession through the neighborhood by 20 men.
The festival’s closing ceremony features a standard procession throughout the neighborhood and is capped with the iconic tug-of-war, which as the name suggests, is a literal tug-of-war in which the statue functions as the metaphorical rope. The men carrying the statue compete to see which side can drag the statue and its canopy over a fixed-line.
Madonna della Cava
The Madonna della Cava (Our Lady of the Cave) is celebrated during the second weekend of August to coincide with its original festival in Pietraperzia, Sicily. Unlike its counterparts, the Madonna is not a statue but an ornately embroidered cloth banner that is paraded through the neighborhood over the weekend. The Madonna has been celebrated annually since 1920, making this year’s festival its 103rd edition. During the 1930s and 1940s, the neighborhood held a raffle in which the prize was a lamb, a symbol that represented sacrifice.
The Madonna della Cava is actually a stone bearing the image of the Madonna that’s located in a cave in Sicily. Centuries ago, according to Christian legend, a mute man discovered this stone in a cave and attempted to carry it back to the city to display to the people. But, every time he attempted to load it onto his cart, it would fall and crack, making it clear that it was the Madonna's will to remain within the cave. The Madonna della Cava is thus a cloth banner in Boston, as the generations of Italians who call her their patron saint believe that if they were to construct a statue of her instead, it would fall and crack just like that original stone did so many centuries ago.
Madonna del Soccorso di Sciacca / Fisherman’s Feast
Held annually on the third weekend of August, the Fisherman's Feast honors the Madonna della Soccorso, (Our Lady of Help,) that hails from the fishing town of Sciacca, Sicily. Founded in 1910, it is Boston’s oldest continuous Italian festival. In Sciacca, the saint has been celebrated every August and February since the 16th century in a much more solemn and religious procession than its American counterpart. There, tradition dictates that the marble statue of the saint, which weighs over 4,000 pounds, can only be carried by fishermen, an honor that references a historic event in which fishermen’s boats were responsible for safely carrying the statue of the saint to Sciacca from where it was constructed in Palermo. Because of the statute’s staggering weight and size, 100 men are needed to parade her through Sciacca’s ancient winding streets.
The Boston feast begins on Thursday evening with a special blessing of the harbor waters to honor the generations of fishermen who have died while fishing or at sea. The festival culminates on Sunday night with the iconic spectacle of the “flight of the angel.” The statue of the Madonna in her canopy fringed by small, gold bells is placed between two buildings and is flanked by two young girls dressed as angels who recite prayers in Italian. A third angel then “flies” between the two buildings via a system of pulleys and ropes, hovering over the saint before being lowered down to press a kiss to her cheek and recite one final prayer that’s punctuated by a spectacular burst of confetti and crescendo of music.
Saint Anthony of Padua
Saint Anthony of Padua was a Portuguese Roman Catholic priest who lived and died in Padua, Italy. Since 1919, the saint has been celebrated by Italian immigrants in the North End who trace their ancestry to the small town of Montefalcione in Avellino, located east of Naples in the southern Campania region. Held on the last weekend of August, Saint Anthony’s feast is the largest Italian religious festival in New England, and is as such coined as the “feast of all feasts.”
On the last Sunday of August, as is done in Montefalcione, the North End jointly celebrates Saint Anthony and Saint Lucy, the latter of which is a society composed exclusively of women. Saint Lucy, protector of eyesight, has been celebrated in the neighborhood since 1921, and while she does not have her own standalone, days-long feast as the other saints do, a day is dedicated to her for a procession.
Asia London Palomba
Asia London Palomba is a trilingual freelance journalist from Rome, Italy. In the past, her work on culture, travel, and history has been published in The Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura, The Christian Science Monitor, and Grub Street, New York Magazine's food section. In her free time, Asia enjoys traveling home to Italy to spend time with family and friends, drinking Hugo Spritzes, and making her nonna's homemade cavatelli.