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Once a highly elaborate affair, today the event involves a song competition and theatrical events, as well as fireworks and street parties. It all centres on a 14th-century sculpture of the Madonna and Child.

Churches and buildings usually closed to the public open their doors for one week.

What started out in Ravello now includes concert venues up and down the Amalfi Coast (see Villa Rufolo).

At Christmas the streets around San Gregorio Armeno are full of shoppers looking for items to complete their nativity scenes, and there are special concerts in churches around the city.

Southern Italy’s largest rockfest invades the area of Bagnoli.

In Italy, Pasqua (Easter Sunday) and Pasquetta (Easter Monday) are both important, as is the week leading up them in some towns. Good Friday processions are held around the Naples area, with an especially rich one on the island of Procida. Pasquetta is traditionally a day for outings – picnics, weather permitting, being a top choice to celebrate the advent of spring. Near Sant’Anastasia, 15 km (9 miles) east of Naples, a festival is held at the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco.

A celebration of the city’s most famous dish, as pizzaioli (pizza-makers) spin their dough.

On the first Sunday in May is the first of a thrice-yearly event during which the blood of Naples’ patron saint – who has seen the city through earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and football championships – flows again. The miracle is received with a hysteria seldom seen in this day and age – a manifestation of age-old faith that involves flower-bedecked processions of the saint’s effigy through the old quarter.

The feast day of St John the Baptist also sometimes sees his blood boil – a phial of it is ensconced in the church of San Gregorio Armeno. Otherwise, the saint is traditionally remembered in charmingly pagan ways, linked to the summer solstice: night bathing, magicians and the gathering of walnuts to make nocino , a liqueur prepared for late autumn.

Every summer, Naples’ tallest belltower is “burned” in commemoration of a legend that recounts how an icon kept here, the Madonna Bruna, saved it from being destroyed by fire. An array of fireworks are dramatically set off at the climax of the festivities.