Feast of Saint Lawrence

Cervia - Festa di San Lorenzo | © Katia Zaghini - Archivio Comune di Cervia

The feast is celebrated in Cervia with bingo and a band concert in Piazza Garibaldi. In the evening, everyone goes to the beach to admire the sky lit up by fireworks.

The festival has been held in Cervia since 1888. In the morning, farmers would come to the beach with their families to spend the day on the beach and to bathe. As this was believed to preserve from winter sicknesses, animals were also bathed in the sea water.

Program

The origins of the festival

10 August in Cervia has always been a special day, one of the town's most popular festivals.
At the dawn of Cervia's tourist development, a poster in 1888 invited people to the traditional feast of St. Lawrence, in which the ingredients were bingo and fireworks, a concert by the town band, the drawing of dowries for the daughters of the salt workers, the raising of the aerostatic globes, and the popular dance at the Establishment. 
But the tradition of the festival is much older. For the citizens of the Romagna hinterland, San Lorenzo was a day out, to be spent at the seaside: on 10 August, the peasants would come to the seaside with their whole families in carts, set up shelter from the sun with tents pitched in the sand and spend the whole day at the beach. The women were covered in wide, long cloth blouses, preferably coloured to prevent them from revealing their shapes once wet.
Because the healthy bath in the sea was inevitable: still today, recalling the tradition, it is said that at San Lorenzo a bath is worth seven and that the bath on 10 August has prodigious effects, useful to preserve from the ailments of winter.
At the beginning of the 20th century, with the rise of tourism and its importance to the town's economy, the San Lorenzo festival became one of the town's main events, attracting large numbers of visitors.
Even today, the main ingredients of the day are the band concert, the bingo and the fireworks display.