Feste tradizionali, feste reinventate

[Machine translation] The essay analyzes the complex festive and ceremonial dimension of ritual time in the city of Vercelli. The research reconstructs the salient features of the traditional festive calendar, in order to detect what was and what remains of the ritual time still profoundly characterized by rhythms marked by orality and gestures, and addresses the complex processes of re-functionalization and re-invention that the popular holiday season expresses in the present. The investigation, on the one hand, brings to light and discusses some festive systems that have helped to define a city calendar in which festive rhythms borrowed from the countryside are still recognizable; on the other hand, it analyzes the contemporary holiday calendar in the light of some ritual changes that are particularly significant. The comparative reading of these two ritual times makes it possible to understand the extent to which they are still in creative dialogue with each other and, at the same time, to trace, within the evolutionary framework of the city's ritual calendar, any lines of continuity and breaking points.