How the feast is conducted

The “Festa del Covo” always falls on the first Sunday in August, the day in which the Covo is finally unveiled and paraded through the streets of the town. However, celebrations already start from the first days of the week, usually on the previous Wednesday, with evening events that always attract a large number of people. In Campocavallo, only a few meters from the Sanctuary, there is a large green area where families stroll and children have fun during the day, while in the evening the events of the feast take place. The shows are chosen so that people can immerse themselves in the festive atmosphere that somehow recalls the popular tradition and peasant life from which the feast itself originated.

The program of the feast usually features a comedy in dialect performed by a company of actors and a show of songs and dances by folk groups, all to be enjoyed comfortably seated outdoors in the tranquillity of the village summer evenings. Cultural evenings on themes related to the feast, its history or the history of the chosen sanctuary as well as suggestive torchlight processions uniting significant places of faith to Campocavallo are organized.

There are also evenings of popular games and card tournaments where people can win hampers of typical products such as cheeses and cured meats, live music, dancing and food and wine stands where it is possible to taste local specialities prepared and served by the women and men of the village

The Sunday, instead, is entirely dedicated to the Covo. Celebrations start at 11 am with the Holy Thanksgiving Mass presided over by the Archbishop of Ancona - Osimo, at the end of which there is the granting of the Spiga d'Oro (a golden ear of wheat), the certificates of Maestro del Covo and the awards of merit. The food and wine stands are already open from lunchtime and games, demonstrations and events start in the early afternoon

And after a year of preparations and a lot of work, in the late afternoon the new Covo is proudly shown to the crowd and solemnly paraded through the streets of Campocavallo accompanied by those created for the previous editions of the feast, local civil and religious authorities, the parish priest, who intones songs and prayers, confraternities carrying their standards, colorful folk groups and the children of the village, who symbolically bring bunches of ears of wheat as a gift.

Spectators gradually join in the procession, thus becoming themselves the protagonists of the feast, and accompany the new Covo to the porch of the Sanctuary, where the official speeches of local authorities and, when the Covo depicts a sanctuary or a cathedral of a different town, delegations invited to the feast are delivered. The ceremony ends with the Eucharistic Blessing imparted by the parish priest. Games, music, dances and lots of good food round off the Sunday of the “Festa del Covo”.