Scoppio del Carro, Florence
Easter Sunday is celebrated with many motorcades and events all across Italy, but one of the most famous is unquestionably the Scoppio del Carro in Florence. Actually, the "blast of the truck" is a Florence folklore dating back to the period of the First Crusade, when, as far as anybody knows, a Florentine was the main man who broke the siege of Jerusalem. When the saint returned, he used stone fragments from the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem to start a Sacred Fire, which he then marched around the city in a magnificent chariot.
On Easter Sunday, the whole Florence population gathers outside Il Duomo to observe the Scoppio del Carro (Explosion of the Cart). This hundreds-of-years-old tradition culminated with an extraordinarily well-maintained model bird lighting off an incomprehensible firework display outside the place of prayer. A detailed cart built in 1622 is driven by a pair of bulls dressed in laurels through the streets of Florence to the square between the baptistery and the house of worship, where the firecrackers are stored and ended.
