San Domenico May 1, 2008

Cocullo snake charmers are over with their snake hunting. They proceeded through the areas called Valle Marzia, Vrecciara, Vipone, Valle Cuta, Antera and Scastielle. Once they locate the snake, they catch it first with a stick and then by the neck. Traditionally the snake's teeth are extracted using the rim of an old hat.
During the procession on the first Thursday in May, before the snakes are placed all over the statue of St. Dominick, they will be fed with milk kept in containers with crusca. It is the snake that, most of all other elements, expresses an ancestral myth: the unknown aspect and unpredictability of the natural environment with man's innate need to achieve the dominance on his own habitat.
The procession with St. Dominick's statue all covered with live snakes through the borough of Cocullo. In the words of Giovanni Pansa, a historian from Sulmona: " The show offered by St' Dominick's procession is most frightening. The viewer's mind is almost paralyzed by what appears before them, filled with awe and repugnance for that blind, repulsive, savage belief in the souls of the good, simple Abruzzese people"
The snakes envelope the saint, move and proceed all over the wooden statue, take up different positions. All around the procession the public is speechless. The only sound is the clicking of cameras taking thousands of pictures that will be shown once back home, becoming an unusual "cult object". Wolf hunters, snake charmers and healing saints make up the psychological space where the population of Cocullo and the whole Sagittario valley draw their certainty that they will not be ruled by evil's blind forces ...
Snakes and wolves were the emblems of Italic peoples like the Marsians and Irpinians. Some areas in Abruzzo, especially in the Sagittario valley, were under the menace of wolves and snakes, which for the local populations represented the uncertainty and anxiety of their existence that, together with the precariousness and hardships of life, were almost unbearable. Therefore the community adopted such magical-religious rites (namely the snakes enveloping the Saint's statue) in order to perform the function of a symbolic protection of the whole territory through St. Dominick's "healing power".

Per gli Italiani:
http://www.abruzzo2000.com/incammino/2001_0/cocullo.htm