Every May a plaster Madonna from a local church does the rounds of our parish or “contrada”, spending a night in each house. Each night the locals gather to say their “hail Marys” in front of the Madonna, before she moves on to the next house. When it was our turn we tidied up the dining room and put a nice tablecloth on the dining table along with some flowers and a couple of candles. Then most of the women of the contrada and their children came along from the previous house, perhaps twenty people in all, to see the Madonna installed for the night. She is a plaster figure maybe two feet high, with, rather touchingly, one finger missing and a white plaster scar where the finger should be. I quite liked having her around for the evening and bravely resisted taking a photo of her in dark glasses or with a cigarette trailing from her fingers. Call me superstitious, but I also bought a lottery ticket that night. Next day they all trooped round for the Hail Marys, which Sue now knows in Italian but not English, and then whisked her away to the next house on the tour. Through the process Sue got to know almost all of our neighbours and their taste in interior decoration.
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