This coming Sunday - 19th July - I’ll be doing something I never normally do: I’ll be attending a religious festival.
For a spectacularly lapsed Catholic, this is spectacularly out of character and yet I'll be heading for St Peter's Italian Church on Clerkenwell Road for the festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Every year, for one joyous afternoon, London EC1 turns into a small village in Italy.
The festival has been going since 1883, ever since Queen Victoria gave Clerkenwell's then huge Italian community permission to stage it. It's one of the few Catholic outdoor processions to have been allowed since the reformation and its significance to British Italians is still huge.
After mass (in Italian so it’s less a church service and more a Puccini opera), a weird and wonderful procession leaves the church to wend its way through the surrounding streets. It’s a parade of countless colourful floats and richly decorated – if often wobbly - statues of saints and of the Madonna herself. Crucifixes, flags and banners are also held aloft in an annual declaration of what it is - or was - to be Italian in London.
There's a simultaneous sense of pride and supplication which you don't see anywhere else. Apparently, the Notting Hill carnival was once similarly humble but unlike that grotesque, overblown monstrosity, Our Lady of Mount Carmel has never sold her soul.
For much of the 20th century, Clerkenwell was London’s Little Italy. St. Peter's parishioners may have moved out decades ago but once a year, they re-materialise. There are children dressed as saints or adorned in traditional Italian costumes on the floats. Parents and grandparents - often tiny people, like Fiat 500s in human form – walk proudly behind them.
I used to go out with a girl whose grandmother - her nonna – was a full-on Clerkenwell Italian. She'd wax lyrical about growing up around Eyre Street Hill or "Aystreet Eel", the core of Little Italy. When the festival is in full flow, her pre-war Clerkenwell is very easy to envisage. You can almost see the flat-capped ice cream vendors singing Neapolitan folk songs as they churned their gelato. You can imagine babies with big, golden earrings and tiny, multicoloured frocks sitting out on the cobbles under the sunshine lines of washing that criss-crossed throughout the little alleys and courtyards of Little Italy.
Even when I was growing up, the neighbourhood was still tinged with green, white and red. As teenagers, a few of us journeyed over on the 38 bus for the youth club disco in the hall next to the church.
We were beyond excited because we knew that the Italian girls who went there were really good looking but we forgot one thing: so were the boys.
The Clerkenwell of yesteryear was not without its problems and given its preponderance of poor Italians, it’s surprising that the Mafia failed to take root in London. But here’s the thing - it did. . Clerkenwell mobsters like Darby Sabini and the Cortesi brothers were doing very nicely until 1940 when Mussolini declared war on Britain.
Churchill responded by taking a hardline approach to any Italians living in Britain, viewing them all as potential enemies. He issued his famous edict, ‘Collar the lot!’ and all Italian men between 18 and 40 were rounded up and interned, most of them on the Isle of Man. At a stroke, Churchill unwittingly wiped out the Mafia in this country before it had a chance to get established.
So the Cosa Nostra will not be represented at the festival but more benevolent Italian associations will be. I’m sure the Mazzini Garibaldi Foundation will be among them. That former girlfriend took me along to one of their lavish black tie fundraisers at the Cafe Royal.
Later in the evening I was formally presented to “Uncle Lou”. Drawing on a big cigar, Uncle Lou considered me with an air of silent menace for what seemed like an eternity. Then he finally granted me a bearhug and a kiss on each cheek. Since he was straight out of The Godfather, I’ve often wondered ever since whether Churchill’s purge was entirely successful.
I'll always adore the Italians which is why, each July, I try not to miss their glorious festival.
In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig defines "anemoia" as a deep nostalgia for a time and a place that you haven’t actually experienced.
Come along to Clerkenwell on Sunday and you’ll know exactly what he means.
