Spadola

Many of the local traditions in the Spadola area are related to the worship of St. Nicholas. The feast of St. Nicholas in Spadola has a double date, the first Sunday in August and December 6, and is a time to enjoy the ritual foods that locals prepare. During the novena on the first Sunday in August, St. Nicholas’ chickpeas can be eaten, cooked according to the customs of a simple cuisine, but one that does not give up the flavor of the food. Chickpeas are eaten boiled, seasoned raw with extra-virgin olive oil and enriched with hot chili pepper. They are eaten in public, in the town square, where a large table is set up and where they are distributed by devotees of the saint. The procession of St. Nicholas is linked to the ritual of the vaccaredha, with the baking of wheat breads in the shape of a cow, blessed by the priest and distributed to the faithful who look out from their houses to await the passage of the saint’s statue. The gastronomic tradition is connected to the folkloric custom of having the procession of St. Nicholas opened by the massari, who dragged by means of a rope the cows, previously blessed, with the little image of the saint placed between their horns. For this very reason that of St. Nicholas was called the feast of the massari. On the December 6 holiday, the ritual of food distribution is preserved, but chickpeas are replaced by granola. The dish is prepared with corn, dried in the sun during the summer, which is boiled, seasoned with extra-virgin olive oil and offered during the procession. Unrelated to St. Nicholas is the cheese game that takes place in the streets of the village during the Carnival period and consists of rolling small wheels, to the designated end point, with the least number of throws. The church dedicated to St. Nicholas, just as a fountain at the beginning of the town is named after the saint, is one of the town’s two houses of worship, while the other, which bears the title of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, is also the seat of the Confraternity of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary and testifies to the historical and spiritual link between Spadola and Serra San Bruno also in its façade, which mimics that, from the 18th century, of the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows in Serra. Spadola, in fact, was one of the territories belonging to the tenimentum and related jurisdiction of the Charterhouse of St. Stephen of the Wood.