Of the whole day, what stayed with me isn’t the floats. It’s the faces. The man in the flat cap holding two white oxen by the halter, smiling as if he were introducing a couple of relatives. The old man in the black hat, red scarf at his throat and a braided straw ear pinned to his waistcoat, waving at someone over my shoulder. The children tucked into niches of wheat on top of the traglie, in costume, wearing that mix of pride and embarrassment only children on display can manage.
The floats are the spectacle. But the festival is them.
A festival born from an earthquake
To understand why any of this exists you have to go back to two in the morning on 26 July 1805. A violent earthquake centred on the Matese area flattened half of Molise: more than five and a half thousand people died. In Jelsi the count was barely thirty. For the community that wasn’t a statistic, it was grace: that day was the feast of Saint Anne, and the town’s survival was credited to her. From there came the vow — to offer her the fruit of the land, the freshly cut wheat — and from there come the traglie, recorded in procession as early as 1814.
There is an older layer beneath the devotional varnish, though. Anthropologists read in it the survival of Mediterranean agrarian rites: wheat as sacred matter long before it was Christian. The pëlomme — the straw votive shrine that rises above the traglie, a woven sunburst with the image of Saint Anne and the young Mary at its centre — looks very much like one of those survivals. Cheeses used to hang beneath it, and until the 1950s dolls, later replaced by real children in costume. Today, under that golden sunburst, you find a little girl sitting and sewing, a white bonnet on her head and the smile of someone who knows perfectly well she is the centre of the scene.
The work you don’t see
What parades on 26 July is the tip of work that began months earlier, at harvest, when the finest and longest ears are set aside. Then the braiding starts: around two hundred women, most of them elderly, producing more than twenty kilometres of wheat braid. Twenty kilometres. By hand, one strand at a time, in kitchens and courtyards. In Jelsi this is taken so seriously that it has a name and a banner of its own: the Scuola delle Trecce, which parades behind a red drape embroidered in gold, carried by a woman in costume and a boy who, holding the pole one-handed, is biting into a loaf bigger than his own face.
Alongside them, some hundred and fifty people build the floats and the traglie, and another fifty women bake the bread of Saint Anne.
The photograph that sums all of this up, though, I took almost by accident: an old man in a white t-shirt and a boy in a straw hat, sitting on the edge of a loaded traglia, waiting. They aren’t doing anything. They are simply there, side by side, on the same piece of wood. Sixty years apart and exactly the same posture. That is how a tradition survives two centuries: not by decree, but with a grandfather who brings his grandson along to sit on the cart.
The animals, and the hands
There is one thread that came back so often in my pictures that it became the real subject of this reportage: the relationship between these people and their animals.
The oxen arrive dressed like brides: brilliant white coats, lace-trimmed veils on the horns, black and gold rosettes on the forehead, tassels, bronze bells. Enormous, and desperately slow. But what strikes you isn’t the pageantry: it’s the way they are touched. A man reaching out to hold his ox’s head without even looking at it, the way you do with someone you trust. A young woman in costume, white lace bonnet and flowered shawl, leaning in to kiss it on the nose.
And then there is the photograph I carry with me more than any other. An ox’s face fills the frame, and beneath its eye runs a dark, damp streak — the trail cattle always have, and which, if you look at it, resembles a tear. Resting flat on its cheek is the hand of an old man, a wedding ring on his finger. He isn’t steering the animal, he isn’t correcting it: he is comforting it. I know it’s tear-duct drainage and not weeping, but what that gesture says is true all the same — the affection between a man and the animal he has worked beside for a lifetime.
Then half past one comes round, and the thing worth staying for happens. At the Aia di Sant’Anna the oxen are made to kneel for the blessing of the wheat: animals weighing seven hundred to a thousand kilos fold their front legs and settle onto the grass, the carved wooden yoke still across their necks. Beside them, their man — white t-shirt, glasses, tattooed arms, not a scrap of costume — bends to adjust the harness with the ease of someone who has always done it. It’s the moment the festival stops being a parade and goes back to being what it is: a thank-you.
The bread, the brides, the children
The day starts early, with solemn mass in the mother church and the handing out of the bread of Saint Anne. And the bread is the festival’s accidental protagonist: enormous loaves, pale and thick-crusted, passing from hand to hand and ending up systematically bitten into by children in costume, with adult seriousness and their mouths full.
Then the traglie and the allegorical floats set off, accompanied by the band, the folk groups and the brides of the year — the young women of Jelsi married in the previous twelve months, who walk the procession in their wedding dress holding a woven straw rose. For me, someone who photographs a good many weddings, that scene landed hard: two women in white in the middle of the road, under the sun, with the whole town around them. Here marriage isn’t a private matter: it’s something the community carries in procession.
And then there are the children, everywhere. In the niches of wheat on top of the floats, red scarves at their necks. On a toy tractor decked out with grain. At the wheel of an actual vintage tractor, in denim dungarees and a straw hat, with the air of someone genuinely driving. That’s the detail that convinced me this festival is not a museum: the children aren’t performing an old part, they are growing up inside it.
One lens, and the festival changes
I went to Jelsi with the Z8 and a single lens: the 85mm f/1.2. On paper that’s a questionable choice for a street festival — no wide angle, no way to step back, no zoom to fix the framing when the crowd shoves you. I did it on purpose, and I’d do it again.
With an eighty-five around your neck you don’t photograph the parade: you photograph the people making it. A short telephoto forces you to pick a face and stay with it, and the compression does the rest — the wheat, the crowd, the stones of the main street dissolve into a warm smear and the subject sits there, isolated, as though nobody else were around. Which is exactly the opposite of how it was.
But the real reason is another one. Carrying a single lens means deciding, before you leave the house, what kind of story you want to tell, and then holding that line to the end. No alternating between wide shots and close-ups, no change of register halfway through the day: twenty-five photographs that all look at people from the same distance, with the same rendering, the same razor-thin depth of field. It’s a sacrifice in variety, and you pay for it: I don’t have a single establishing shot from that day, no square, no procession seen from a distance. In exchange I have a story told in one voice.
It isn’t a method, to be clear, and it isn’t a rule I’ve set myself. Which lens goes in the bag is something I almost always decide on the doorstep, by feel, according to how I wake up that morning. That day I felt like looking at faces.
The light was kinder than expected: the late-July midday sun was there, with its hard shadows under the hat brims, but enough cloud came through to hand me several minutes of diffused light — and that’s where the best portraits came from. In the worst hours the Z8 still does something cameras of ten years ago could not: with the electronic shutter you can hold f/1.2 at midday without reaching for an ND filter.
A town that puts itself on show without dressing up
There were plenty of people: onlookers, families, a startling number of photographers and a thicket of smartphones held up to catch every passing float. And yet Jelsi doesn’t perform. There are towns where tradition has become a service for tourists, a staging with showtimes. Not here: the festival belongs first of all to the people of Jelsi, and that’s the first thing that reaches you — bright, harmonious, wholeheartedly shared. Visitors are welcome, but if they stopped coming tomorrow, 26 July in Jelsi would unfold in exactly the same way. The weather helped too: full late-July heat, yes, but with a steady breeze that kept people out on the street to the end.
Perhaps that’s why the recognition arrived on its own: Italian intangible heritage, European cultural heritage since 2018, and now a UNESCO candidacy within the project “Rituals and artistic wheat floats”. Recognition that, if it comes, will certify what Jelsi already knows.
In short, if you want to go
- Where: Jelsi (CB), Molise — about 20 km from Campobasso
- When: every year on 26 July, the feast of Saint Anne; 2026 was the 221st edition
- What to see: the parade of traglie and wheat floats in the morning, the brides of the year, and around 1.30pm the blessing of the wheat at the Aia di Sant’Anna, with the oxen kneeling
- What to taste: the bread of Saint Anne, handed out and blessed
- Practical note: free entry, shuttle buses running all day; park outside the centre
- Tip: the morning is the right time to photograph people; don’t leave before half past one
What I take home
Two hundred and twenty-one years ago a town was frightened, badly. Instead of forgetting it, it decided to turn that fear into something beautiful — and to do it again every single summer without missing one.
It was my first 26 July in Jelsi, and I’m going back next year. With which lens, I don’t yet know: I’ll decide that morning, on the doorstep, the way I always do. Maybe I’ll take a different one on purpose, to force myself to see the same festival another way — which is, after all, the only good reason to return to the same place twice.
But the photograph I take home isn’t of a float. It’s an old hand, wedding ring on the finger, resting on the cheek of an ox that looks like it’s crying.
This isn’t folklore. It’s memory being braided, one strand of straw at a time.
The gallery
Every photograph from that morning in Jelsi. Click to open them full screen.
