The Rificolona

Tuscany · The Po plain and the northern Apennines
Florence, piazza della Santissima Annunziata and the streets of the centre; the evening of 7 September, eve of the Nativity of Mary

The Rificolona — the paper lanterns that the boys of Florence carry about on the top of a cane on the evening of 7 September, eve of the Nativity of Mary, converging on piazza della Santissima Annunziata.

Variants and dialect names

rificolona, rifricolona; in the traditional explanation fierucolona, from «fierucola», a small fair. In living Florentine also figurative: «to look like a rificolona», of a woman dressed gaudily or sloppily

What is told

Lanterns of coloured paper, once with a candle inside, carried about on the top of a cane by the boys of Florence on the evening before the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, 8 September. The procession converges on piazza della Santissima Annunziata, where for centuries the fair of the eve was held; the other boys shoot peashooters and peel to puncture and set fire to each other’s lanterns, and whoever carries one sings the taunting refrains. The explanation one hears repeated is that the rificolone mock the lamps with which the peasant women of the mountains came down at night to the fair, and the clumsy figures of those women: «large paper puppets, representing caricatures of the mountain women, with the light under the skirt».

What it was forthe author’s reading

A threshold rite between summer and the new working year of the city, built on the town’s mockery of the countryside: the lantern is at once the pilgrim’s lamp and its caricature. As in many children’s festivals, the living part is not the devotion but the game of mutual destruction, which the nineteenth-century sources already record as central.

Where it is attested

Earliest lexicographical attestation found: Pietro Fanfani, Vocabolario dell’uso toscano, Florence, Barbèra, 1863, s.v. «Rificolona»: «a small lantern of coloured paper, which the boys of Florence carry about on the top of a cane on the evening of the eve of the Nativity of Mary, singing». The explanation of the fair and the mocked peasant women, and the etymology from «fierucolona», are in Giuseppe Conti, Firenze vecchia. Storia, cronaca aneddotica, costumi (1799-1859), Florence, Bemporad, 1899, ch. XXXV «Fiere, Rificolone e Ceppo». Ottorino Pianigiani, Vocabolario etimologico, 1907, repeats it with a «vuolsi… forse» (it is said… perhaps). The Treccani dictionary gives the etymology as «prob. der. di fiera». A living festival, today organised with a city procession and boats on the Arno.

Caution

Three things must be kept apart. The rite is documented from 1863, and Conti in 1899 already reported it in decline («nothing remains but a pale memory»): today’s festival is a twentieth-century revival. The explanation «fiera → fierucolona → rificolona» and the mockery of the peasant women are a late nineteenth-century reconstruction with no documents behind it: plausible, and for modern dictionaries merely probable. The datings in circulation — «since the 1300s», «since the mid-seventeenth century» — rest on no source that could be found; a print by Carlo Lasinio and Giuseppe Piattoli of 1790, Le Rificolone, reported at the Uffizi, would be the oldest attestation but has not been checked against the museum’s record. The pilgrimage on foot from Impruneta to the Santissima Annunziata, often presented as the origin of the festival, is an initiative of the 2000s. The rhyme «Ona ona ona, ma che bella rificolona» appears neither in Fanfani nor in Conti, who reports other refrains: its first attestation has not been found.

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