https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85113700150&partnerID=40&md5=cfbe6f3c2d9277c48128108706aa4153

The Festa dei Gigli in Nola is one of the most typical and exuberant religious events in Southern Italy. Its character of immersive popular experience helped it receive the UNESCO recognition as intangible cultural heritage, along with three other Festivals of a similar kind. The Giglio (Lily) is a wooden structure that is mounted and dismantled annually during the month of June and then transported on the shoulders of a group of bearers through the streets of the old town of Nola. The festival is set up in honor of St. Paolino, bishop of the 5th Century, who managed to free the faithful of his Diocese who had been deported to Africa by Alaric and his Vandals during the barbaric persecutions, as narrated by Pope Gregory the Great. As a thanks-giving for the liberation, the citizens of Nola greeted the bishop, paying tribute to him with fragrant lilies. Every year, the community gathers in memory of its patron saint, repeating this act of homage. The paper analyzes the distrust of 20th-Century Italian Church towards modern art, and also reports on the strong mistrust of the scientific milieu about the practice of tattoos, especially in the first half of the century. The paper also comments on the relationship between the deviance of social behaviors (as the tattoo was considered almost exclusive practice of prisoners) and the condition of 1excessive' exuberance of the emotional states aroused by the Festa dei Gigli, in view of the overall process of secularization that took place in Italy during the second half of the 20th Century.