WHILE most people in Williamsburg’s Italian section know about the Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola Feast in which thousands of revelers pack the streets every mid-July to see the giglio carried on a platform complete with a brass band, carried by over 100 local parishioners, it’s quite possible that non-Brooklynites don’t know about it. I happened by the giglio structure at Havemeyer and North 9th Street a few years ago.
During the feast, games and refreshments abound. Though I had seen images of the feast on TV for years, this was my first up close look at the giglio itself. As this Street View indicates, the metal framework is raised first and the sculptures are applied after that.
I knew nothing of the feast’s origins, so I consulted the reliable 6sqft:
The feast celebrates the return of San Paolino di Nola, the town’s Catholic hero. As legend has it, in 410 AD North African pirates took over the town of Nola and abducted young men as slaves. After meeting a widow who lost her son to the pirates, Bishop Paolino went in the boy’s place. After a Turkish sultan learned about Paolino’s selfless act, he freed him and allowed the bishop to return home to Nola.
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Upon his return, the town greeted Bishop Paolino with lilies (Gigli in Italian), which are symbols of love. According to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, this homecoming became the first observance of “what would develop into an annual sacred event.” Each year following, there was a competition among tradesmen over who could create the best and biggest display of lilies.
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Eventually, the competition evolved to include wooden steeples with decorated lilies. Since the 1960s, the tower has been made of metal, with papier-mache carvings of angels and flowers, with San Paolino on top. The structure is supported by four metal legs. The platform features seven poles that stick out evenly from beneath the platform on each side, allowing for 100 men to lift the Giglio.
The feast wraps up this week, but rest assured, it’ll return next July.
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7/18/25
2 comments
They used to “dance” with the Giglio in my old neighborhood\parish of St, Rita’s in Ravenswood. They would close the street down and have food and games, in conjunction with the bazaar run by the parish. If I remember correctly it was run by the San Clememte Society. Last I remember it was probably late ’70s, early “80’s.
Just a minor point — and this really goes to the writer of that 6sqft article — but Paulinus (Paolino) served as the bishop in Nola from 410-431 AD, and the apocryphal story of his selflessness which even the Catholic Church is very skeptical about relates to Vandal raids in the region around Naples (which would include Nola) that were staged from areas in North Africa. The Germanic Vandal tribes mostly originated from what is now central Poland before sweeping through Germania, Gaul, Hispania and ultimately Roman Africa. But these raiders were not by even the greatest stretch “Turkish”, nor were they ruled by a “sultan”, as that term applied exclusively to certain Muslim leaders beginning nearly 600 years after Paolino had died. I guess a reference to a Germanic king as part of a multi-generational migration/conquest that played a major role in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, including the Vandal’s sack of Rome in 455 (from which our word ‘vandalism’ is directly derived), just doesn’t conjure up the same sort of imagery as Turkish pirates and sultans which would have been a major issue in the region a millennium or so later.