The Secret

Many neighborhoods in Naples still celebrate the ritual of the bonfires of Saint Anthony in mid January. Kids start collecting firewood after New Year’s, sometimes venturing far from home to look for it. Every group stashes their wood in a different hiding place, “the secret,” so they can protect it from being raided by other neighboring groups. Checco Lecco’s gang from the Spanish Quarters has been hiding spruces of all sizes in an abandoned site: it was cleared twenty years before when they demolished a building damaged by the 1980 earthquake. Every afternoon, the kids leave from their “secret” in small groups and head to the elegant parts of town to retrieve Christmas trees discarded after the holidays. The countdown to January 17th, the day of the bonfires, is spent between hectic searches and skirmishes, sometimes real and often imaginary, to defend their treasure from the assaults of the “enemies.”

 

 

 

In many quarters of Naples the collection of the spruces for the bonfires of Saint Anthony is a tradition, a ritual, an adventurous game that the kids pass down from generation to generation. For those who look at it from the outside, it may just appear as a sequence of acts of vandalisms and yelling till night, that ends with a dangerous fire, too close to the buildings. We wanted to tell about what happens in many streets around the city in January, from a point of view that’s the closest to the one of a bunch of kids. Following them in their hunt, their coalitions and tiffs between gangs, observing their behaviours, their language, their codes of conduct.