The Battenti of Guardia Sanframondi: Faith in Their Hands

In Guardia Sanframondi, in the heart of Sannio, faith is made flesh and manifests through a universal and poignant language: that of the hands. Every seven years, an entire community gathers for the Seven-Year Rites of Penitence, a centuries-old heritage that goes beyond mere tradition. This reportage doesn't focus on dates or events, but on the profound meaning of every single gesture. It's a journey that explores how devotion, penance, and community bonds take shape in a touch, a grasp, an act of offering.

Hands, Blood, and Silence: Faith Made into Gesture

The hands are the true thread of this story, the means by which the Battenti communicate their profound state of mind, remaining veiled and unknown to the crowd. The figure of the Battente is not just that of a penitent, but of a faithful individual who has chosen to offer their body as an instrument of atonement. The Rites are a spiritual journey, a solemn vow made to the Madonna Assunta to ask for a grace. Every strike, every act of penitence, is an expression of prayer, a way to unite one's own pain with that of Christ. It's not an act of self-harm, but an offering made with the soul and the body, in a mystical union that transcends pure physicality. Pain in this context is purification, a means to reach a higher and more profound spiritual dimension.

The Silent Story of Sacrifice

In the photographs, you will see hands that carry the weight of penance, gripping the instruments of sacrifice: the crown of thorns, rosaries, crucifixes. These are hands that are stained with blood, grasping the sponge of pins to inflict the wound, while others offer wine to disinfect, in a ritual that is at once pain and healing..

You will see reflective and penitent hands, moving with precise intent, sometimes alone in the space among the hooded crowd, other times beating their chests in unison in an act of collective sacrifice. You will see the strength in the hands that support the statue of the Virgin, and the humility in those that join together in silent prayer. Each gesture tells a story of deep devotion, an intimate and unbreakable pact between the faithful and their protecting Virgin.

These are calloused hands, the hands of simple people, the hands of sons and fathers, who pass this rite down from generation to generation. It is they, with their gestures, who tell the story of a faith that lives and is renewed, that attracts pilgrims and draws emigrants back home, uniting the entire community in a single, powerful collective prayer.

In an era of frenzy and distraction, these hands remind us that faith is a tangible act, a story that is passed down, a gesture of love that can be transmitted from one hand to another, from generation to generation. This is the true legacy of the Seven-Year Rites of Guardia Sanframondi.

Giampiero D’Antonio

Warning: Some content may offend your sensibilities

Behind the scene of a decadent giant

This is the sad little story, like so many scattered throughout the Italian territory, of a slow and inexorable decline of a noble palace and of the people who lived there, taken as an example to bring to the attention of the reader, a much wider phenomenon and which, as mentioned, involves our historical heritage throughout the Italian territory.

This palace was built in the seventeenth century by the noble local family, in whose hands it will remain until the early years of the new millennium.

Over the centuries, there have been numerous renovations, due to external events such as earthquakes, Unfortunately, arriving at the present days, in conjunction with the decline of the family, in recent decades, the building has suffered serious and irreparable damages, mainly due to neglect, which inevitably marked its fate.

The house is fully shored up, to avoid structural collapses, and today it is totally unusable. Completely emptied of any element of value, left to collapse in general indifference, today his sheltering pigeons and cats who have found the comfort of a house among its noble rubble.

As anticipated in the first line, this is a fairly common photo story in Italy, where, growing abandonment and wild overbuilding, they leave our territory with hundreds of thousands of forgotten buildings. The numbers are frightening, and trace the profile of a nation that is slowly crumbling, about 6% of all Italian real estate assets are on the way to becoming ruined, a percentage that continues to grow year after year.

Only for statistical purposes, here are some data: About 50,000 buildings are now in a state of neglect, including noble palaces, villas and castles . Approximately 20,000 between ecclesiastical buildings, churches, abbeys and convents in disuse.

The rediscovery of these places, excluding the romanticism of memories, hides a serious social problem: the erosion of the territory. Suffice it to say that it is estimated that over 10,000 square km of territory already occupied by abandoned buildings, in addition to a constant and increasing overbuilding, only in 2018, about 2 square meters per second were cemented, the equivalent of 15 football fields a day.

Today We let concrete devour the territory, the overdevelopment of suburban urban areas, the countless building abuses in protected and at-risk areas, new and useless commercial areas, forgetting the numerous abandoned places that could be redeveloped.

But to us all this seems to leave us indifferent, continuing to build and abandon, following the consumerist logic that has long governed our lifestyles and that will soon lead us to the dissolution of our natural and historical beauties.