While most of Italy is celebrating Christmas, there is one place in the country that isn’t. You won’t find Christmas trees, lights, or people running around dressed as Santa Claus. Everything is shut. Visitors are a rare sight.
Here, people don’t celebrate Christmas – not at this time of year at least, because they don’t go by the Christian calendar and tradition.
Welcome to Terranera, a tiny mountaintop hamlet of 50 residents in the central region of Abruzzo, perched on a rocky plateau, 1,400 metres up in the Apennines. Here, there is a cluster of old, thick-walled stone houses and winding cobbled alleys. And silence.
I spotted a few cats, but when I went looking for a baker’s shop – no chance. I wanted to buy a panettone, the traditional Italian Christmas cake. Not this year.
As I walked around the hamlet, frozen half to death, I wondered where all the Christmas magic was. Terranera felt a bit dark and creepy, which is perhaps appropriate as its name translates as “black land”. Legend goes that Templar knights in black robes used to live here. It’s that sort of place.
An old man was looking out of his window, so I asked him where all the Christmas buzz had gone.
Suggested Reading
Italian pizza culture erupts in uproar
“We’re not celebrating Christmas, simply because we have already celebrated our own very particular Christmas, in our own peculiar way, this summer. And each year it’s a success,” he said.
A few further enquiries established that the old fellow wasn’t joking. Uniquely, it seems, Terranera celebrates Christmas in August, during the hottest season in Italy. The reason is that they want the festivities to fall during the nicer weather.
Which is fair enough – when everyone else in Italy is sunbathing and sweating on the beaches, it’s winter up in the mountains. Locals wear boots and coats all year round.
So why not make the most of it and move Christmas forward? And besides, in August the temperature here drops close to freezing anyway, and the snow gives a strong Christmassy vibe.
It makes sense, I suppose, but I was still disappointed. I was hoping to experience Christmas in the mountains.
When the town does sit down to celebrate Christmas, dozens of wooden tables for 200 people are set up for the Christmas Eve dinner in the tiny piazza, with bright red tablecloths. There’s a Christmas tree decorated with lights, a bonfire, lights dangling from village walls and flowery decorations on shepherd dwellings. Everything sparkles.
Locals dress as Santa Claus, wearing bouncing big red and white hats. Children wear fake reindeer horns. Festive food is laid on the tables, including slices of panettone and mulled wine to warm you up, while open-air brick ovens bake bread and biscuits.
Christmas carols, toasts and group selfies are taken under the glittering tree… and it turned out I’d missed it by four months.
“We’ve been doing this ‘summer Christmas’ as a way to embrace the forthcoming bitter winter, and to draw tourists,” said the old man, rubbing it in.
Apparently, shifting the Christmas celebrations to August was a relatively recent move. When the 50 inhabitants suddenly increased four-fold to 200, the one-off initiative was made permanent.
The unusual event, which is repeated cyclically to say goodbye to the end of summer, adopts a different theme every year: from Disney characters to pop culture icons.
As I made my way back to the car, I thought how weird it was, but at the same time how surprising – and Christmas magic should always contain an element of the unexpected.
Silvia Marchetti is a Rome-based freelance journalist
