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Macchina di Santa Rosa (Viterbo)

3 September 2026 — A tower of light drifts through the night – a quiet bow to Saint Rose.

Every year on the evening of 3 September, the Italian city of Viterbo holds the Transport of Saint Rose's Machine (Trasporto della Macchina di Santa Rosa). The festival honours Saint Rose of Viterbo, a young woman of the 13th century and the patron saint of the city. The Machine is an illuminated tower about 30 metres tall, decorated with hundreds of lights. About a hundred bearers, called facchini, carry it through the narrow streets of the old town, walking in step amid crowds of pilgrims and onlookers. The procession ends near the sanctuary of the saint. Each new Machine is specially designed and built, and is used for only a few years. The tradition is inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, together with other Italian processions of large carried structures. The date is fixed in the solar calendar, and on a late-summer night the tower's glow looks like an earthly constellation drifting through the dark.

Flying across the sky: An ethereal, bluish-silver figure made of luminous dots and fine lines, like a constellation: a tall slender tower with tiers of tiny glowing points, like candle flames, gliding slowly across the night sky as a beacon

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