The Explosion of the Cart in Florence

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On the morning of Easter Day, the magic of the “explosion of the cart” is renewed.
The “Brindellone”, the “fire” chariot escorted by 150 armed men, musicians and flag-wavers of the Historical Parade of the Florentine Republic, moves from the Piazzale del Prato, pulled by two pairs of white flowered oxen and arrives in Piazza del Duomo, where it is placed in the space between the Baptistery and the Cathedral. Then, to the singing of the “Gloria in Excelsis Deo”, the fuse of the dove is lit which, hissing, goes to ignite the firecrackers and fireworks cleverly placed on the wagon.

The explosion of the cart is a ceremony that has a particular meaning, especially for the Florentines, as it calls into question historical and devotional reasons intimately connected to the identity of the city. Just think of the auspices drawn for centuries from the flight of the Columbine that from the main altar of the Cathedral reaches the Chariot causing its explosion; From the progress of that race, there has always been a fantasy about what the upcoming harvest season would look like in the countryside.

Not to mention the legendary story of Brindellone: the word “brindellone” belongs to the Florentine jargon and defines a tall, dangling person, perhaps a little unsteady and a little beggarly, to whom one looks with a certain affection and with a substantial sympathy. It seems that the origin of the combination between this word and the chariot dates back to the feast celebrated by the Florentine Mint in honor of its protector, St. John the Baptist. On June 24, a hay cart left the Mint tower and went around the city, pulling a man dressed in rags who obviously represented the hermit saint and who was called “brindellone”, also because he tended to hang around a lot, especially after having eaten and drunk abundantly during the banquet consumed in the square. Since then, the term has remained in popular use to identify all the floats used in the city for public ceremonies.

This festival dates back to the distant times of the First Crusade and, in particular, to the return from Jerusalem of the Florentine captain Pazzino dei Pazzi who brought with him three stone flakes from the Holy Sepulchre. The three stones were used to draw a spark of “new” fire distributed to Florentine families, after the blessing, to relight the domestic hearth. In this way, the custom of distributing the “holy fire” to the clergy and people as a sign of the Resurrection spread in Florence.
In fact, it was the Pazzi family, with the construction of the monumental “Chariot of Fire”, who laid the foundations of today’s ceremony which, in a symbolic way, distributed the blessed fire to the whole city.
Starting from the seventeenth century, the ceremony took on its current characteristics, with four gracefully dressed oxen pulling the Brindellone from the Prato headquarters to the Duomo.