Tradition, religiousness and creativity

The “Festa del Covo”, which is held every year on the first Sunday of August and the days preceding it, is a thanksgiving celebration dedicated to the prodigious icon of Our Lady of Sorrows which is venerated in the Sanctuary of Campocavallo. During the feast, in fact, a Covo, which is a real rural work of art made with two to three million skilfully intertwined ears of wheat, is offered to the Madonna in festive procession.

Preparations start well in advance. In fact, as soon as one edition of the feast finishes, they already start working on the next one. So much so that there is the tradition of announcing during the feast the theme of the Covo for the following year. The skill, craftsmanship and expertise with which men and women, old and young each year work together to build the Covo represent one of the last expressions of the creativity, knowledge and ability of local people to produce, innovate and enhance what nature has to offer, in a relationship with Mother Earth and its fruits that has always been one of great respect and love.

Since 13th August 1939, the date of its first edition, the “Festa del Covo” has kept its tradition and the values that have accompanied and characterized it over time intact. Faith still is essentially the reason that has always guided the people of Campocavallo in the creation of the Covo. The feast is, in fact, part of the popular religiousness of the Marche region, which is the expression used to indicate the gestures, prayers and religious attitudes of popular tradition, of popular piety.

Furthermore, the “Festa del Covo” seems to maintain some aspects of the archaic legacy of rural religion, that is, of the relationship between ancient cultures and the evangelical message, in which life in the fields was accompanied by a considerable series of prayers and gestures, and tillage, sowing, harvests, livestock, rain and clear sky were constantly entrusted to God and the saints for the cycle of the earth's fertility to continue to support the existence of the people who lived in the fields.

The “Festa del Covo” is also one of the most authentic expressions of the peasant civilization of the Marche region, which has now almost disappeared, but which marked the life of most of the inhabitants of the region for many centuries up until the early 1970s.

Today, this feast represents an occasion for the community to recover those values that have become less important in modern civilization. It is also an opportunity to recover the festive dimension as a unifying moment in which people have the possibility to communicate with the rest of the community, integrate, identify as part of it and actively participate in it.