In Nocera Terinese, a Calabrian town of fewer than 4,000 inhabitants in southern Italy, the “Rito dei Battenti” is performed each year between Good Friday and Easter Saturday.Hundreds of men, called Battenti, walk through the streets flagellating themselves with a ritual tool known as Il Cardo — a cork disc embedded with glass shards — offering their blood in a gesture of penance and devotion to the Virgin Mary.
The ritual begins in private, after purifying themselves with boiling rosemary water, and becomes public only in the presence of L’Addolorata, a 17th-century wooden statue carried through the town in procession.
The streets of Nocera are filled with silence, red-stained travertine, and the sound of the funeral march La Jona.
It is a gesture that blends pain and community, body and faith — repeated unchanged for centuries, once a year.
