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Updated: June 20, 2025
They who succeeded in carrying their lights from boundary to boundary unextinguished were declared the victors. This game will at once recall the moccoletti, which close the carnival at Rome. Dancing to the sound of the cithara, flute, and pipe, was a favorite amusement with all classes. The grizzly veterans and the younger soldiers all joined in martial dances.
Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the <i>moccoletti</i>, which I but half saw, like a languid reporter resigned beforehand to be cashiered for want of enterprise.
For the diversion of the Moccoletti, the last gay madness of the Carnival, is now at hand; and sellers of little tapers like what are called Christmas candles in England, are shouting lustily on every side, 'Moccoli, Moccoli! Ecco Moccoli! a new item in the tumult; quite abolishing that other item of Ecco Fiori!
It was better than the <i>moccoletti</i>. I shall always remember the first I took: out of the Porta del Popolo, to where the Ponte Molle, whose single arch sustains a weight of historic tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow between its four great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the crest of the hill and along the old posting-road to Florence.
We have seen birthday illuminations in London and in Paris; we have seen the cupola of St Peter's start into pale yellow light, as the deepening shadows of night shrouded all things around; we have seen the Corso, on Moccoletti night, a long fluctuating line of ever renewed light, from the street to the fourth story an illumination sui generis, and "beautiful exceedingly;" but noise and confusion are around all these as you approach them.
Monkish skulls and other unburied bones, seen by the light of moccoletti, were to me nothing but forms of folly. The abounding life of Catholicity was hardly understood by our party, which for some reason seemed inclined to impute the most death to the faith which has the most form.
Forbes had her own hired balcony, as became a wealthy and respectable Englishwoman. The girls had a great basket full of bouquets with which to pelt their friends in the crowd below; a store of moccoletti lay piled on the table behind, for it was the last day of Carnival, and as soon as dusk came on the tapers were to be lighted, to be as quickly extinguished by every means in everyone's power.
The last moccoletti are extinguished, that flashed and danced like myriad fire-flies from window and balcony and over the heads of the roaring tide of people that ebbed and flowed in stormy streams of wild laughter through the streets. The Corso has become sober and staid, and taken in its draperies. The fun is finished. The masked balls, with their belle maschere, are over.
But who can describe the thousand means of extinguishing the moccoletto? the gigantic bellows, the monstrous extinguishers, the superhuman fans. Every one hastened to purchase moccoletti Franz and Albert among the rest. The night was rapidly approaching; and already, at the cry of "Moccoletti!" repeated by the shrill voices of a thousand vendors, two or three stars began to burn among the crowd.
As Lent is ushered in by the dancing lights of the moccoletti, so it is ushered out by the splendid illumination of Saint Peter's, which is one of the grandest spectacles in Rome. The first illumination is by means of paper lanterns, distributed everywhere along the architectural lines of the church, and from the steps beneath its portico to the cross above its dome.
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