ST. GENNARO
Little know that Ianuario was the true name of S.Gennaro. It came down, in fact from the noble family sacred Gens Januaria to the bifronte god Giano. Qundi Gennaro (Neapolitan transformation of Ianuario) was not his/her name, on the contrary the last name. Non official sources affirm that its name was Procolo.
St. Gennaro is, without doubt, one of the most famous figures in the panorama partenopeo and he can quietly affirm that it is known and revered all over the world.
THE MIRACLE OF THE BLOOD
You believes that a pious woman had picked up in two cruets the blood of St. Gennaro to deliver then the precious relic to the bishop of Naples.
The contained blood in the cruets of glass of ancient manner is today still object of deep veneration with the other preserved relics in the Cathedral in Naples.
The clots spontaneously curdled dark color and solid loosen him. Blood reboils and assumes the alive red color.
POPULAR BELIEFS
St. Gennaro doesn't mean only religious devotion towards a prestigious saint.
It also represents a point of reference for popular beliefs, a lot of of which also superstitions.
The game of the Lottery
The Procession
THE GAME OF THE LOTTERY
Naples is the city of the folklore and the game that has always had endless teams of followers of every social extraction. You are enough to think about the fortune of the lottery, the sixteenth-century Genoese game, that transplanted in Naples has created around itself a real mythology, a true philosophy.
The people in Naples blindly believed so much that every thing had a reference in the lottery that the government was forced to suspend the bets on facts of chronicle too played for not risking the failure of the boxes said State.
Based game on the book of the Grimace (probably from Morfeo, the God of the dream) that explains the dreams and that it points out all the numbers that correspond to characters and events of the daily life. Every Neapolitan knows that the grimace is a key to translate dreams or events in numbers to play to the lottery, and that Grimace is also a book to consult for knowing the key.
Instead not everybody perhaps knows that the apparent banality of that volume reassumes the different traditions met in the game: that oral, that connects the numbers to the facts of the daily life and that "cultured", elitist and esoteric that, to guess the numbers, uses the cabal.
The numbers of St. Gennaro: 9 - 15 - 18 - 53 - 55
THE PROCESSION
The procession develops him on first Sundays of May and is an ancient tradition that he/she remembers the first transfer of the relics of the saint from the sour one they March to the catacomb in Naples. This procession, called also "procession of the statues", it is together a show of faith and folklore.
This event places three the other two fixed dates of the recurrent prodigy of the liquefaction of the blood: on December 16, anniversary of the eruption 1631 vesuviana and on September 19, gives some martyrdom of san Gennaro.
The story that he/she saw involved Gennaro, happened in the first halves the III° century, in full Christian persecution from Diocleziano.
To that times, Gennaro, bishop of Benevento went him to Pozzuoli to make visit to the believers and here found the martyrdom for order of the judge anticristiano Dragonzio.
The liquefaction happens usually accompanied by the fervent prayers and insistent invocations to the Saint. The formalities with which the breakup happens: time, intensities of the blood are considered of good auspice for the city if they happen without delays, in the contrary case they are of unfavorable sign.
The miracle repeats twice regularly him others in the year: in May and December and in particularly remarkable circumstances for Naples as for instance the visit of some important character, the threat of natural calamities etc.
For the first time the liquefaction of the blood of St. Gennaro was annotated in 1389 on the pages of the "Chronicon Siculum." From that moment in then studious, scientists and researchers are sbizzarriti in to write on this unusual fact.
Thin to today anybody you/he/she has succeeded in finding the solution of the mystery. Accordingly around the blood of St. Gennaro numerous legends and superstitions are grown.