Fara Filiorum Petri

The name is half Lombard and half Latin. The fara was the group of related families into which that people was divided, a body at once political and military, which gave its own name to the land where it settled; the rest, of the sons of Peter, most likely comes from the Celestine monks of the convent of Sant'Eufemia, who called themselves so after their founder, and served to tell this Fara apart from all the others. Every year, on the sixteenth of January, the districts build giant torches made of reeds bound with weeping willow branches — the farchie — and burn them in the square in front of the chapel of Sant'Antonio abate. They have been doing it since 1799, the year of the miracle: tradition tells that the saint halted the French invasion at the edge of the village, and that on the spot where it happened there stood a small oak wood, ten of whose trees always had the same trunk diameter. There, in 1947, as soon as the war ended, a church was built to thank him for three things at once: the French halted, the oaks, and an ox cart that during the German occupation knelt down and refused to carry off a family forced to evacuate. In front of that church the farchie are lit once every twenty-five years.

The twentieth century began well: the village band played in Vienna in 1899 under the direction of maestro Giuseppe Dell'Orefice, and the farchie took the form they have today in those same years. Then, between 1940 and 1943, the fascist authorities designated Fara as a place of civil internment for the foreign Jewish refugees present in Italy: the internees were eleven. With the German occupation three of them were arrested and taken to their deaths at Auschwitz, one was killed on the spot, and the other seven managed to escape capture by hiding or fleeing, and reached Switzerland or the areas of the South already liberated. The passage of the front left the village almost entirely destroyed and counted hundreds of victims. The post-war recovery, here, they still call the Fara miracle.