By Jessica Easthope
Danny Vecchiano was brought home from the hospital in a Giglio t-shirt. This year, his shirt says “Capo #1” of the Giglo feast – it’s the honor of a life time.
“This is the most important thing that we do in this feast, right? This is a beautiful festival and a wonderful show of heritage and our tradition, but carrying the Giglio is the most unique thing that happens in the city,” Vecchiano said. “There’s plenty of Italian festivals, but we have this. So it was really important to us that we did this the right way.”
The new Giglio facade took Danny and several other volunteers seven months to make. The plaster and paint that sits in an upper room at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Williamsburg is what’s left of their labor and countless man hours. They did it so the Giglio can dance 72 feet into the sky on Sunday, looking better than ever.
“It’s a kind of replica of a Giglio that they built here in 1954. One of the things that we identified very quickly is that we wanted to use Styrofoam as opposed to wood, to build this, to make it lighter,” Danny said.
This is the 137th feast which was started by Italian immigrants from Nola, Italy. Danny, a trumpet player and the owner of the band that sits atop the four-ton structure carries on the tradition of the feast and his family.
“We’re totally invested, totally devoted. And we made it fun too, it wasn’t labor, it wasn’t work,” he said.
The Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Feast goes from now until July 21.