Sulmona Events

La Madonna che scappa in piazza

The town's great ritual, on Easter Sunday morning. A statue of the Virgin in black mourning is told that her son is alive, doubts it, then is carried at a run across the whole of Piazza Garibaldi by the green-robed brothers of the Confraternita di Santa Maria di Loreto. As she runs the black cloak falls away to green, doves are released and a rose appears. Whether the bearers stumble, and whether the doves fly, are read as omens for the year. Thousands watch, most of them from the valley.

Holy Week

The processions that lead up to it run all week, with the Good Friday procession of the dead Christ and its Miserere the most sombre of them.

Giostra Cavalleresca

In late July the main square is floored with sand for a costumed joust between the town's quarters, revived in 1995 from a fifteenth-century original. A European edition follows in some years with visiting teams.

Certamen Ovidianum

Every spring, a Latin translation competition on a passage of Ovid, drawing school students from across Europe to the town he came from.

San Panfilo

The patronal feast at the end of April, centred on the cathedral at the north end of the corso.

Market days

Not a festival, but the fixed event of the week: on Wednesday and Saturday mornings the market takes over the whole of Piazza Garibaldi, and the valley comes down to it.

Summer in the valley

Through July and August almost every village in the Peligna runs its own sagra, and the historic trains on the Isernia line fill on weekends.