’O sang: San Gennaro on the Skin, Naples at the Heart
In Giovanni Troilo’s documentary, screening in Italian cinemas from 25 to 27 January 2027, devotion to San Gennaro permeates bodies and everyday gestures. A reflection on sacred imagery, faith and belonging.
There is a moment in the documentary ’O sang. Il miracolo di San Gennaro when the sacred becomes flesh. A tattoo artist works with a needle on a man’s body, tracing the figure of San Gennaro onto his skin: an image that, from that moment on, can no longer be put away, lost or left in church. It is just one of the film’s many scenes, yet it encapsulates its entire message: in Naples, devotion is not a separate chapter of life, but a substance that runs through it.
Directed by Giovanni Troilo and produced by Nexo Studios and Officina della Comunicazione as part of the “I Misteri della Fede” series, the film will screen in Italian cinemas from 25 to 27 January 2027. More than a documentary in the strict sense, it is a collective portrait: it follows a florist who makes silver amulets at night at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, a taxi driver explaining the miracle to tourists glued to their smartphones, the daily life of a blood donation centre, and the rituals behind the scenes surrounding the vial, alongside the abbot of the Royal Chapel and the Duke Carafa d’Andria. What holds everything together is the anticipation of a miracle that, each time, might fail to occur. This raises a fundamental question: what happens when a religious image ceases to be merely an object of devotion and becomes an (essential) part of a person’s identity?
An object establishes a distance: we pray to someone before something, and the artefact acts as a bridge while remaining outside us. When, instead, we carry that image with us—in a name, a gesture, a tattoo, or the way we address the saint with the affection reserved for a relative (the nickname “Faccia gialla”, or “Yellow Face”, which Pino Daniele turned into a song)—that distance narrows until it disappears. The saint is no longer simply the one we turn to for a blessing: he becomes a symbol of our roots, a strand of DNA that says who we are and where we come from.
In Observations on Folklore in the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci warns against a condescending gaze: “folklore” is neither an oddity nor a picturesque curiosity, but “a serious matter to be taken seriously”. He describes it as a “conception of the world and of life” held by certain sections of society, in opposition to official conceptions, and also as an “indigestible conglomeration” of fragments from different eras. The formulation fits San Gennaro perfectly: Christianity, pagan memory, civic pride and superstitious practices coexist without anyone feeling the need to separate them. The tattoo, then, does not illustrate a faith: it puts it into practice as a worldview.
Pier Paolo Pasolini saw Naples as “the last plebeian metropolis”, as he wrote in 1975—the year of his death—in Gennariello, the short pedagogical treatise published in the weekly Il Mondo. In a 1971 interview with Antonio Ghirelli, he went further: the Neapolitans are a great tribe that rejects the new power of modernity and chooses to die out, “remaining Neapolitan to the very end—that is, unrepeatable, irreducible and incorruptible”. It is a radical and contested interpretation, with more than a hint of nostalgia, but it also helps us understand the film under discussion: in an age of homogenisation, wearing a saint on one’s skin can be a way of declaring a sense of belonging that mass consumption cannot absorb. The opposite risk is that the image becomes a brand, a sticker, a social media filter: when identity can be worn, it can also be sold.
The anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, a Neapolitan through and through, perhaps offers the most precise interpretative key: in his analysis, religious rites and symbols are not remnants of superstition so much as shields through which a community protects itself from what he called the “crisis of presence as the risk of not being in the world”. De Martino himself identified this formulation as the enduring core of his The World of Magic: the fear of being unable to withstand the impact of suffering, history and death. From this perspective, the sacred image helps us remain present, to regain a firm foothold when the world falters. The shared anticipation of the miracle, in which the blood may or may not liquefy, is a collective ritual: an entire city finds itself looking in the same direction.
When a religious image becomes part of identity, its function changes. It ceases to mediate solely between human beings and the divine, becoming a mediator between the individual and the community, between the individual and the self. We no longer simply look at the saint: we recognise ourselves in his gaze. And the distinction between faith, tradition and belonging, which seems necessary to an outside observer, holds little sway in Naples. Perhaps this is what the tattooing scene suggests: San Gennaro is not merely to be believed in or doubted, but inhabited. The bond between this extraordinary saint and his Naples lives not only in the ritual of the vial, but in those who carry him with them. A saint in whom an entire city recognises itself, and through whom each person recognises themselves as part of the city: faith, tradition and popular identity become one.
Born in 1998. A journalist (Rockol, La Gazzetta dello Sport) and social media manager for various organisations and institutions. Firmly believes that the history of society can be read through the grooves of a vinyl record, the films of Park Chan-wook and the exhausted faces of cyclists at the Paris–Roubaix finish line. Listens to Giorgio Gaber to find new questions and looks into their dogs’ eyes to find the answers.
