The Sposa pojana of Poggio Cancelli, a hamlet of Campotosto situated on the northern shore of the lake of the same name, is the community re-enactment of a rural wedding as it was celebrated until the first decades of the twentieth century. The designation pojana identifies the inhabitants of Poggio Cancelli (pojani) and their local culture, distinct from that of Campotosto itself and of the other settlements in the surrounding area. Historically, the territory of Poggio Cancelli gravitated until the end of the eighteenth century towards Montereale and was subsequently incorporated into the present municipality following its separation from Amatrice. The re-enactment, therefore, draws upon a ritual heritage that crosses administrative boundaries and restores a high-altitude rural wedding culture — simultaneously pastoral and cereal-growing — strongly patrilocal and founded upon a network of symbolic exchanges unfolding throughout the entire marriage cycle.

Marriage itself unfolded through several distinct phases. The first, the addimanno, represented the formal engagement: the prospective groom, accompanied by his entire family, visited the bride’s home on the evening before the wedding for the formal ceremony of recognition between the two family groups, during which the date was agreed, the dowry discussed, and the organisational details of the banquet established. This was followed by the eve serenade beneath the bride’s windows, with improvising poets engaging in an endless poetic challenge, celebrating the virtues of the young woman, accompanied by ciaramelle, traditional double-reed folk wind instruments similar to shawms.

In the days preceding the wedding, the women of the village gathered at the communal oven to prepare bread and sweets in large quantities, intended for the banquet and for ritual offerings. On the wedding day, the groom, together with all his relatives, went to fetch the bride and accompany her to church; at the end of the ceremony, the procession continued towards the banquet venue guided by the sound of the piagnipezza, a melody performed exclusively with ciaramelle, traditional double-reed folk wind instruments similar to shawms. Intensely moving in character, it symbolised the bride’s separation from her parental home, from her mother and from her sisters. The bride’s female friends organised the banquet and took place either in a threshing floor or in a house large enough to accommodate the hundreds of participants, since the pojano wedding was not an exclusive celebration for invited guests, but a feast for the entire village.

After lunch, the bride returned to her parents’ house to change her dress. At the same time, her brothers and male relatives prepared lu trajone or the barrozza, the traditional two-wheeled wedding cart, decorated with fabrics, ribbons and bows and pulled by a pair of adorned cows. Upon it were loaded the mattress, embroidered pillows and the dowry chest: thirty-six sheets spun from the flax of Poggio Cancelli, towels, kitchen cloths, nappies and everything the bride wished to bring into her new home. Behind the cart, the bride’s friends arranged themselves in procession, carrying upon their heads the canestre, large wicker baskets containing food for the newlyweds’ first week of married life, gifts that had been received and the remaining portion of the dowry.

Halfway between the bride’s house and the groom’s home, the procession stopped for the parata: a symbolic ceremony of negotiation between the male relatives of the two families, particularly meaningful when bride and groom belonged to different districts of the village, divided by the river and the bridge. The bride’s relatives demanded in exchange for the young woman the greatest possible number of sugared almonds; at the end of the negotiation, the bride was symbolically “handed over” to the groom, and the procession resumed its journey amid dances, showers of sugared almonds and the sounds of ciaramelle, button accordion and tambourine.

The culminating moment of the ritual took place on the threshold of the new home, where the mother-in-law awaited the bride in order to welcome her with the gift of coral. The strand of red coral offered by the mother-in-law belonged to a set of three strands that every married woman was expected to preserve throughout her life: the first was received from her own mother upon her death; the mother-in-law gave the second at the moment of entering her husband’s household; the husband presented the third upon the birth of the first male child. The strand given to the bride, therefore, represented the first element of a trigenerational chain of female transmission, a symbol of blood, life and memory, and a prefiguration of the role that the young woman would assume within her new family. The celebration then continued in the groom’s house until late into the night, with the saltarello, improvising poets competing in ottava rima, and wine flowing without interruption.

The contemporary re-enactment of the Sposa pojana reconstructs this articulated ceremonial cycle by compressing it into a single August day. It keeps alive, through community performance, a cultural memory that finds in the poetry of Paolo De Angelis — the celebrated improvising poet of Poggio Cancelli, who wrote his compositions on the occasion of his sister’s wedding — the original poetic source for the re-enactment of the tercets and ottave recited during the procession.