They have strung a dead man from a gibbet outside our house. We had to close the shutters on the alley so Sybil wouldn’t see him dangling there and be frightened.
The moon is surfing black clouds that pound through the night sky. Fulvia, our neighbour, said it is the sort of Friday that witches fly.
The walled garden opposite our front door has become a taverna. The ground has been cleared and shields, boars’ heads and flambeaux are mounted on the stones.
The young men wear kilts. They are followers of Braveheart. A drummer leads the march up the steps. They jostle round their prisoner who is pulled on a chain by an executioner. The head of the prisoner is shrouded. The executioner wears a black leather mask. A tattered friar kisses his cross and a fresh faced priest waves his thurible. Where the crowd is thickest, the drum beats quicken; the prisoner – I think it is Claudio Pucci who has a good job up Fabriano way – is thrust to the ground. The Scotsmen yell and the axe rises and falls. The anachronistic cigarette that drips from the axe man’s mouth is strangely convincing….
As we climb to the piazza past the medieval blacksmith’s smithy and the food stalls, cold breezes buffet us, a contrast from the limp heat of the week. On the corner between the watch shop and the Countess’s house a gypsy is reading a fortune. Two Carabinieri guard the shop where the town’s brasswork is on display. The last remaining master of the craft that brought fame to this town for centuries phlegmatically hammers a bowl.
The usual crowd are gathered outside the wine bar. Emidio’s straggly white beard and long hair could fit any age. We seem to have travelled back further in time, for a group of white robed Maenads are whirling in the centre of the square their arms reaching out at the throng, their priestess chanting something indecipherable in the local rasping Forcese dialect.
The Sindaco, his dark glasses as usual high up on his matinee idol forehead, passes us beaming with pride. Earlier, we had seen Tiziana, the village event organiser, wandering like an impresario among her creations.
There is a shout of laughter from the stall selling cups of pure, clear, bowel-burning Mistra, the much loved local hooch.
Music thumps up from the Scotsmen’s taverna two streets below. It will later become the disco of this year’s festival, as it was in last year’s festival when the Scotsmen were cowboys and the walled garden a saloon. Its decibels will shake our house well after three in the morning, driving away sleep as hopefully the hanged man will drive off ghosts.
It is the first night of Force’s traditional Festa when for a weekend this hill topped town slips back through layers of history to its fondly imagined past.
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