Saint / folklore
Festival of the Lilies (Nola)
Paulinus of Nola born Pontius Meropius Anicius Paulinus, was a Roman poet, writer, senator, and bishop. He attained the ranks of suffect consul and governor of Campania, but, prompted by the counsels of his Hispanic wife Therasia of Nola and by the assassination of the emperor Gratian, abandoned his career and was baptized as a Christian. Later, probably after Therasia’s death, he became bishop of Nola in Campania.
In the book
Nola’s Feast of St Paulinus, in which towering wooden ‘lily’ structures are carried through the streets; in 1944 the procession brought the town to a standstill and sliced through the army’s telephone cables by the hundred — Eric Williams’s despair.
Appears in 1 diary entry.
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June 27 1944A colleague describes a revived, medieval-style flagellant procession at Guardia Sanframondi; two more feast stories follow — Nola's Feast of the Lily disrupting army telephone lines, and a trip to Amalfi for the thrice-yearly 'manna' relic of St Andrew.
Feast of St Paulinus; giant wooden 'lily' towers paraded through Nola, cutting army telephone cables in the process
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