Easter explosions: When hearts and carts implode in Italy
Memories of an Italian tour with the kids on Easter + TO DIE FOR dinner recipe
This week’s post is a reprise of something I wrote in 2021 that captures my post-pandemic, early-sobriety Easter longings. It’s hard to believe that our Italian excursion was six years ago. Also, I will not go to my grave without seeing that cart explode someday.
My four kids and I arrived in Florence on Easter three years ago right after the famous Scoppio del Carro or “Explosion of the Cart.” We’d taken an early morning bus from Siena and as we dragged our luggage through the crowded cobblestone streets, we could see bits of the burnt cart strewn near the curb.
During the trip’s planning stages, I had been hot to get to the city early enough on Easter morning so we could elbow our way towards the Duomo to see the annual spectacle. I’d read online that a cart full of fireworks arrives in the packed square and a dove-shaped rocket symbolizing the Holy Spirit flies out of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore to ignite the cart, known as the Brindellone. I kid you not, this is a thing.
But our arrival in Florence that Easter morning, after a 90-minute ride on a bus that smelled like a urinal, signaled the third city we’d visited since we landed in Rome four days earlier and the children had had it. After three full days of guided tours – of ruins, a Tuscan winery and an extensive walk through the narrow streets of Siena including a glimpse of St. Catherine’s mummified finger – they just wanted to get to the hotel and had zero interest in a cart stuffed with fireworks.
I’d been apprehensive about spending a whole week in Italy with my four kids. My younger daughter was in Florence for the semester and her two older siblings and teenage brother and I met her in Rome for about six days of intense sightseeing. I had booked pretty much every moment of the trip in advance out of fear of giving any of that underlying tension that bubbled between the five of us the opportunity to find a small hole to leak out and ruin what I’d come to think of as a trip of a lifetime. When else, I figured, would I have the opportunity to experience Italy side-by-side with my four kids?
To micromanage all of those feelings, I employed the same strategy that seemed to work when we’d all gone to London together a few years earlier. While everyone was exhausted at the end and we practically ran through the Churchill Museum on one of the last days, we all agreed the trip was amazing overall.
But Italy combined all the touring plus traveling from Rome to Siena to Florence and back again to Rome. I’m tired just reading that sentence.
Instead on that Italian Easter, we hauled our suitcases through the streets to our charming hotel along the Tiber with rooftop seating where we drank a bottle of white wine and enjoyed the view of the city’s iconic red rooftops and nearby Duomo. We took pictures posing on the Ponte Vecchio and that night ate dinner at a bougie restaurant known for its blueberry steak.
I thought about our trip to Italy a lot last year at the height of the pandemic when I had all four kids home and riding out the sheltering-in-place. Once again, I’d tried to mitigate tensions by controlling the children with chore charts and weekly meetings with printed-out agendas, which lasted for about a month until the two girls got into my Honda and drove away the day before Easter. The boys and I ate pizza and watched “Fight Club” that night and a stye like you’ve never seen exploded under my right eyelid the next morning.
I drank a lot of red wine and sadly remembered Easters of yore, recalling old pictures of the kids and their cousins posing holding baskets filled with plastic eggs stuffed with jelly beans and chocolate bunnies. Instead, the boys and I heated leftovers and I saw on Instagram that my daughters had enjoyed homemade pasta and sauce they had made together.
We went to bed that last night in Siena before leaving Easter morning for Florence with our bags packed for the early morning bus ride after probably our best meal on the trip at La Taverna di San Giuseppe. At midnight I was awakened by what at first I thought was the alarm on my phone but soon realized a loud gonging that was coming from outside.
Our tiny hotel was tucked in a small cobblestone courtyard behind the city’s massive medieval cathedral, whose earliest sections date back to the 13th Century. Its façade is made up of white and greenish-black marble in alternating stripes and the bell tower contains a bell cast in 1149.
Those bells were clanging joyfully to celebrate the start of Easter and it went on for so long that I kept thinking I was in some kind of fever dream. Where else but in Italy, the ground zero of Catholicism, would you find exploding carts and the peal of bells in the middle of the night to celebrate that Christ had risen? I laid in bed and tried to soak in the details: the loudness of the bells, how they seemed to be ringing right outside my window facing the courtyard, that it was like the bells ringing at the end of some Disney cartoon to indicate a joyous occasion.
This Easter, Italy is in lockdown for the second year in a row and I read online that the cart would still explode in Florence but the spectacle would not be open to the public. Here in New Jersey, the holiday will also be quiet as I navigate another sober holiday and the attendant feelings I used to be able to soften with wine. I think back to this time last year and it’s almost laughable how I thought I could keep a lid on all those feelings when we were all trapped in a house in New Jersey together during a pandemic when we couldn’t even hold it together in fucking Italy for six days. Who needed an exploding cart when we were all stuffed with our own emotional fireworks, just waiting for someone to light the match?
Of course, that’s just one story I could tell about that trip with my children. The other one, the more accurate one, was that it was full of tension but also, wonderful moments. Looking up together at the Sistine Chapel or out at the ancient ruins of the Coliseum and imagining the epic battles that took place before massive crowds. Tossing coins in the Trevi Fountain over our shoulders and sitting in a Tuscan farmhouse for lunch. Relaxing side-by-side on that hotel rooftop and basking in the Italian sunshine, the river winding its way below with stone bridges spanning each side as far as the eye could see.
We move forward, stepping over charred bits of burnt cart, pulling our bags along the bumpy streets and looking for a place to rest.
sunday shares: read + watch + cook + buy
TikTok for the yummy win. When was the last time I shared something from the “cook” category, as promised above? Five-ever ago. But my daughter who does cook came home for the weekend and we made two amazing things.
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The recipe above was both as easy and delicious as promised. The couscous stuck to the bottom of my pan so next time I’ll put it on a lower flame to simmer. DELISH
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Do you love an almond croissant? I am FERAL for almond croissants. This frangipane blondie is the equivalent of an almond croissant’s insides smeared in an 8 by 8 pan.
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In which I cheat on Esther. I have been going to Esther to take care of my nails — in particular a permanently split one — for years. She doesn’t speak a lick of English (well, maybe one small lick), but we really love each other. However, after about a decade of gel manicures, Esther has really done a number on my nails. They are kind of fucked. The salon’s owner told me, since Esther couldn’t, that I needed to take a break. However, that split nail can’t be naked or it does bad things. I did what the TikTok gal (in video above) told me to do and am very pleased after about 5 days.
Happy Easter,
xoAmy