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We are crowded into the medium-sized piazza before the sanctuary of Montevergine There is no town or village; it sits alone near the top of an isolated mountain A narrow road leads up to the sanctuary walls, which rise seamlessly from the sheer limestone incline The buildings are simple: just a few square blocks tucked behind a rectangular bell tower and a tall, narrow church They are uniformly pale, and at this time of year, in bitter winter, sit like dirty butter pats under a dusting of snow The snow also covers the barren scrub of one of Italy’s wildest regions, Basilicata, which unfurls with dreary panache in the valley one thousand metres below I am early and the cold drains the blood from my hands, rushes it into my cheeks and to the end of my nose I’m even early enough to catch a candle seller so old that she seems to be made of stone She is tiny and she sits against the wall She is rotund only because she is wrapped in so many layers of blanket What appears to be a blue pillow is tied to her head She clutches her brightly-painted candles as though she doesn’t really want to sell them, as though she’d rather donate them all to the Madonna that everyone is here to worship When she realises that my real purpose is not to buy them, but to talk to her, she refuses to utter another word and looks angrily at the ground   The old woman is selling candles because today is Candlemas This is the official end of Christmas and the day on which candles are blessed in Christian churches all over the world Candlemas is the oldest Marian ritual and one of the earliest to appear in the written sources[1]   ***   Despite its imposing history, this celebration does not appear to be an entirely serious event All over the piazza small groups are arriving Most of them come from Naples, which lies sixty kilometres to the east of Montevergine A lot of people carry unrecognisable instruments; many of