In Paciano, the Church of San Carlo Borromeo celebrates ancient Christian traditions

In the village of Paciano there is a church that, closed all year round, opens up like a treasure chest during the Easter period, with a particular and very evocative rite.

Even though San Carlo Borromeo – an Italian cardinal and archbishop among the greatest refounders of the sixteenth-century Catholic Church, the one who proposed the institution of seminaries for the training of priests – is remembered on November 4, the 1629 church dedicated to him that stands in via Danzetta, in the center of Paciano, opens its Renaissance door during the Easter period to welcome the faithful into the atmosphere that characterizes it.

In fact, the nave, dotted with eight wooden altars from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the high altar surmounted by a large crucifix with two angels, are for the occasion covered with funerary vestments and decorated with vases of vetch (vicia sativa), a herbaceous plant that normally infests cereals but which here, as a symbol of life that wins over the darkness of death, is grown in the dark, losing all the green color that characterizes it.

The wooden simulacrum of the dead Christ, dating back to 1628, is placed at the foot of the altar; the candles create an atmosphere of recollection in view of the Easter celebrations.