Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/282

 244 advantage that men could stand inside these hyperbolical tapers, and whirl them continually so as to produce a phantasmagoric effect, which, considering that the towers were numerous, must have been calculated to produce giddiness on a magnificent scale."

The procession of San Giovanni is now shorn of its former splendour, and but few of the English-speaking travellers who throng the City of the Lily are aware that though towers no longer perform their whirling course through Florence they are still to be met with in other parts of Italy.

The "Rua" of Vicenza.

The largest of these so-called "dancing towers" is the "Rua" of Vicenza, a stupendous edifice twenty-five metres in height, and weighing eighty-five quintali. The property of the Guild of the Notaries, it was once one only among many similar erections, each of which bore the insignia of a trade, was surmounted by the image of a patron saint, and usually contained some sacred relic. In the year 1441 the Guild of the Notaries erected a new and superior Cero, henceforth called the Rua or Ruata. It was a permanent structure, redecorated each year, and some portion of it at least could be made to revolve with great rapidity like the towers of San Giovanni. Formerly the Ceri of the various Guilds paraded the streets at the Festa of the Corpus Domini, but, in the eighteenth century the Rua was secularized, the form of its decoration was altered, and it was no longer permitted to take part in the ecclesiastical procession.