Macchina di Santa Rosa

A tower on a hundred shoulders

The Macchina di Santa Rosa is a tower about 30 metres high, built to honour Rose of Viterbo, the city’s patron saint. Every 3 September about a hundred men, the Facchini di Santa Rosa — the porters of Saint Rose — lift the structure, which weighs around 5,000 kilograms, and carry it along a route of just over a kilometre through the squares and streets of Viterbo’s medieval centre, among crowds of devotees and onlookers. A new design for the Macchina is built every five years.

From a saint’s body to a machine

The festival has two parts. On the afternoon of 2 September a reliquary holding the heart of Saint Rose is carried in procession, accompanied by people in costumes of the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The transport of the Macchina follows the next evening. It recalls the moving of the saint’s body in 1258, six years after her death, from a small parish church to the church of Santa Maria delle Rose.

The first “machine” was probably designed in 1686, and in the eighteenth century noble families of Viterbo paid for ever grander towers. The history has not been without disaster: the machine fell in 1790; in 1801 panic in the crowd left twenty-two people dead and the machine caught fire, and the transport was banned for some years; in 1814 it tipped backwards and porters died.

One of four

The Macchina di Santa Rosa is one of four Catholic processions of giant shoulder-borne structures — with the obelisks of Nola, the processional structure of Palmi and the Candelieri of Sassari — inscribed together on UNESCO’s Representative List. UNESCO describes how the shared, carefully coordinated effort of the bearers binds these communities together through mutual respect and cooperation.