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On July 14 on the island of Elba, at Capoliveri, people celebrate the Sweetheart's Feast.
Traditional costume torchlight procession that from the earth sails for the sea, it was set up in the second half of 1600, and, interrupted only from the First World War, it has started again since 1985 as a revival of the Sweetheart's legend.
In 1534 Maria and Lorenzo, two young people of the place, made of the beach Cala de lo ferro their refuge of love.
The biggest obstacle to their union appeared to come from the rich family of the boy, but Lorenzo, not at all frightened, had already asked Maria to marry him.
It was instead from the sea that, armed with sharp sabers, a fatal impediment come.
In the afternoon of July 14 Lorenzo was waiting on the shore for his beautiful girlfriend.
Maria, who was reaching him by a high path, saw a boat of pirates landing and was powerless witness of the ferocious assault by corsairs against his beloved.
Exhausted after the unequal struggle, the young was taken prisoner on board.
Running shocked to the beach, Mary saw the dead body of Lorenzo thrown into sea and, just anxious to reach him, she dived into the water and never returned.
Her shawl, caught in a rock, is all that was found.
More than a century after the Spanish nobleman Don Domingo Cardenas was shocked one evening in July to see camp against the horizon of the cove the profile of a young woman illuminated by an infinite number of flashes.
Learned by fishermen the legend of Mary and Lorenzo, Don Domingo Cardenas made floodlit the beach, which renamed of the Sweetheart, to enable the girl to find his beloved.
A clause in his will ensured the perpetuation of the torchlight procession.
Even today, on July 14, the Sweetheart's Feast illuminates with a thousand lights the legendary cove of Capoliveri and ends with the "Disfida della Ciarpa" (the challenge of the scarf) when one of the contrades of the village recovers a special shawl and entrust it to a new Mary who will, finally, find love with it.
arininchi
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