The presepe — the nativity scene, the representation of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem with the figures of Mary, Joseph, the infant, the shepherds, the Magi, and the angels — is one of the most universally recognisable objects in Western Christian culture, and its Italian form is distinctive enough from the northern European tradition that encountering a proper Neapolitan presepe for the first time is a genuinely disorienting experience for anyone whose mental image of a nativity scene comes from the Germanic or Anglo-American tradition. The Italian presepe is not a minimal arrangement of seven or eight figures on a windowsill. It is a world.
The tradition of the presepe in Italy traces to a specific origin: the nativity scene constructed by Saint Francis of Assisi at Greccio in 1223, using living animals and people to represent the event of the birth, in a deliberate act of making the theological abstract into physical and emotional reality. The Franciscan tradition of devotional theatre — making sacred events physically present and emotionally accessible — spread the presepe tradition throughout Italy in the centuries that followed, and the artisan crafts that developed to serve the tradition — the terracotta figures of Deruta and Caltagirone, the painted wood figures of the Tyrolese tradition, and above all the elaborate Neapolitan presepistic tradition that reached its height in the 18th century — constitute one of the richest decorative art traditions in Italy.
The Neapolitan Presepe: A Social Document
The Neapolitan presepe tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries took the devotional nativity scene and transformed it into something unprecedented: a complete representation of Neapolitan society, in which the biblical event of the nativity takes place within a rich and detailed rendering of the city’s own streets, markets, buildings, and social types. The shepherds of the biblical narrative become the specific figures of 18th-century Neapolitan street life — the fisherman, the macaroni seller, the tavern keeper, the lawyer, the monk, the prostitute, the nobleman in his carriage — represented in terracotta figures of extraordinary quality that can stand as independent works of sculpture entirely apart from their function in the nativity scene.
The greatest collections of Neapolitan presepe figures — in the Museo di San Martino in Naples, in private collections, and in the presepe tradition maintained by the artisans of the Via San Gregorio Armeno (the street in the historic centre of Naples that has been the centre of presepe production for centuries and remains so today) — are genuinely impressive as works of art. The best figures from the major Neapolitan workshops of the 18th century — the Celebrano, the Mosca, the Sammartino workshop that also produced the Veiled Christ — have an expressive quality and a precision of execution that place them among the great small-scale sculptures of the Italian tradition.
The Via San Gregorio Armeno — the presepe street of Naples — is active throughout the year but most intensely in the period from October through Christmas. The workshops along this narrow lane in the Spaccanapoli district produce figures of the traditional types alongside contemporary additions: the satirical figures of politicians, celebrities, and current events figures that the Neapolitan presepe tradition has incorporated since at least the 17th century (when kings and popes appeared among the shepherds at the manger). Walking the Via San Gregorio Armeno in November — the presepe workshops open, the artisans working at their benches, the figures arranged in every conceivable group — is one of the more engrossing sensory experiences in Naples.
Greccio: Where It Began
The village of Greccio in the Rieti province of Lazio — the site where Francis of Assisi created the first living nativity in 1223 — maintains the tradition of the living presepe (presepe vivente) that Francis originated, and visiting it in December provides the most direct connection with the historical origin of the tradition. The sanctuary complex that developed around the site of the original nativity (the Franciscan monastery of Greccio is built into the cliff above the village) contains the cave where Francis constructed his scene and a museum that documents the tradition that spread from this starting point.
The living presepe traditions that exist throughout Italy — the presepe vivente of Greccio, of Rivisondoli in Abruzzo, of Isernia in Molise, of numerous other villages — reconstruct the biblical scene with living participants (local people in period costume) in the specific landscape of their village, typically at night, with torchlight illumination that gives the scenes a quality that the candlelit tradition of the presepe originally sought to evoke. The Rivisondoli presepe, held in the mountain village south of Roccaraso in Abruzzo, takes place in a village setting covered in snow and is among the most atmospherically convincing living nativities in central Italy.
The Domestic Presepe Tradition
Beyond the museum collections and the famous street traditions, the Italian presepe is fundamentally a domestic object. The construction of the family presepe — the annual ritual of assembling the scene in the weeks before Christmas, adding figures over the years, repairing damaged pieces, arguing about the arrangement — is the domestic expression of a tradition that has been continuous in many Italian Catholic families for generations.
The complexity and elaborateness of domestic presepi vary enormously: from the simple commercial sets of mass-produced terracotta figures (which are themselves substantially better in quality than the equivalent manufactured sets of other countries) to the elaborate multi-level constructions with working water features, miniature buildings, and dozens of figures that occupy significant space in the family home throughout the Christmas season. The commitment involved in the elaborate version — the construction, the storage, the annual reassembly — reflects the seriousness with which the tradition is taken in the households that maintain it.
The Franciscan tradition of the presepe continues in its most direct form in the Franciscan churches throughout Italy, where the Christmas nativity scene is typically a more elaborate and carefully constructed version than the domestic presepi of the surrounding neighbourhood. The Franciscan churches of the major cities — the Santa Croce in Florence, the Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome (where the Santo Bambino figure is one of the most venerated in the city), the numerous Franciscan churches of Naples — typically have presepi of significant quality and sometimes of considerable age.
The Christmas Markets and Presepe Fairs
The tradition of the Christmas market (mercatino di Natale) is more northern European in origin than Italian, and the version that has become popular in Italian cities in recent decades — particularly in the German-influenced Bolzano and Trento in the Alto Adige, where the markets are most closely integrated with the Central European tradition — is distinct from the Italian presepe tradition. But the two have merged in some contexts: the best Christmas markets in Italian cities typically include sections dedicated to presepe figures and accessories, and the quality of the artisanal work available at the presepe fairs of Naples, Rome, and the Franciscan centres (Assisi, Greccio) provides a level of craftsmanship that the manufactured gift market does not.
The Fiera dell’Artigianato in Rome’s Piazza Navona — the Christmas market that runs through December and into Epiphany — is one of the most traditional Italian Christmas market experiences, dominated by figures of the Befana (the witch who brings gifts on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, in the Italian tradition that persists alongside the Santa Claus Christmas tradition) and presepe figures in the Neapolitan and Roman artisan traditions. The quality ranges from the excellent to the commercial, and distinguishing between them is part of the experience.
Reading the Presepe as Cultural Document
The Italian presepe — particularly the Neapolitan version — is a cultural document of unusual richness because its devotional function required that it represent the world as well as the sacred event. The social types of 18th-century Naples that appear as shepherds at the manger preserve a social history of the city that no other document provides in the same combination of visual specificity and emotional weight. The figure of the lavandaia (the washerwoman), the pastificcio (the pasta maker), the fruttivendola (the fruit seller) — all represented in the same medium and with the same formal seriousness as the Madonna and the Christ child — constitute a social panorama of the pre-industrial city that the presepe tradition uniquely preserves.
This quality of the Italian presepe — its simultaneous devotional and documentary function — is what makes it more than a seasonal decoration. The best Neapolitan examples, seen in the context of the workshops that still produce them in the same manner, in the same materials, in the same streets where the tradition has operated for three centuries, are works of art and social history simultaneously. The presepe tradition is one of the more direct and unbroken connections between contemporary Italian culture and the artisan traditions of the 18th century that produced some of the most exquisite decorative objects in the Western world.
