Notes
In a small medieval town in Apulia, a religious procession passes through a circular rotunda on a street that forms a ring around the town’s concentric layout. A forward movement through a section of the street, or a set of streets, carries a historical narrative reenacted by participants in period clothing.
The figure of Maria SS. Addolorata, one of the many yearly processions in Italy, is a type of devotion to the Virgin Mary, often depicted holding a handkerchief, with droplets of tears running down her face, or with seven swords, representing seven sorrows, piercing her heart.
In the history of the understanding of time, the idea of linearity brought by Christianity—a progression from suffering toward transcendence, as embodied by this figure—replaced previous cyclical concepts of time and established a narrative model for secular belief in linear progress.
This narrative, now embedded in political and cultural imaginaries, through aesthetic forms like composition, rhythm, imagery, and light, arranged in deliberate sequences such as triumphal marches, creates a feeling of advancement, while at the same time returning to the same point it departs from.