Nine-year-old Maria wakes up and can’t wait for her party day to get started, after the first communion sacrament she received the day before. When the photographers and the videomakers arrive at her home, she slips into her bedroom and puts on some makeup to welcome the guests. She is ready for the day she will never forget.
First communion in Naples is not just a religious sacrament but is experienced as an important rite of passage to be properly celebrated, and a community event with many levels of interpretation and meaning, not just limited to religion.
For the young person involved and for their family the holy communion is filled with social and moral public obligations to be fulfilled, from wearing expensive clothes to providing banquets and putting on spectacular stage shows with bands singing modern Neapolitan pop music.
In recent years, communions have often become more important than weddings, especially for parents who have had children before marriage. The celebration of their child’s communion becomes the feast of their dreams, the one they did not have for their wedding, and it is also perceived as an entrance into society.
Even though in 1910 the Pope reduced the age for receiving the sacrament from 10-14 years old to seven, the first communion in the social context appears to be still related to the arrival of puberty, especially for the female communicants, often called spose bambine (child brides). They are in fact dressed, embellished and treated like young brides, with elaborate and expensive dresses made in the city’s best ateliers.
In this photographic project Diana Bagnoli follows the daughters of the famous photographer of events and ceremonies, Oreste Pipolo, called “the shaman of weddings”. His daughters, Ivana and Miriam, inherited their father’s studio and, like him, they sell a dream, building elaborate photo sets before, during and after the first communion day.
All the big expenditures – banquets, dresses, entertainments, photo shoots and so on – serve to convey a sense of social worth and to mark, or sometimes re-establish, the status of the communicant’s family within the local community. There is also a competitive element in displaying and sharing your goods with the community members and putting on the best and most lavish show.
Such behaviour appears to be particularly related to a social milieu that is historically connected to poverty; to show economic capacity may mean power but also social improvement. And it is also related to the high level of “theatricality” of Neapolitans in the public space, as observed by anthropologists who have done fieldwork in Naples – including myself, having carried out ethnographic work in this city for more than a decade.
The celebration of the first communion, as it involves young children and the whole community, holds a great social meaning. It is a premise and a promise for future success. And it has to be a day to remember forever.
Diana Bagnoli is a freelance portrait and social reportage photographer based in Italy.
Marzia Mauriello is an anthropology research fellow at the University of Naples, focusing on construction, deconstruction and representation of gender identities in the contemporary world.
