It is New Year’s Day. Midnight has been marked with the usual eruption of noise. If there was silence in heaven for half an hour, there was limitless noise in the city for that same period. The sky filled with fireworks, the air with their smell, one’s ears with the thump of the explosions.
In Rome anything that can make noise is used: one year I saw a neighbour on his balcony shooting a rifle into the sky, perhaps believing it would be doubly effective. For it seems that this instinct to make as much noise as possible has ancient, primitive roots. The turning of the year is a vulnerable moment, a changeover that has to be carefully guarded, lest witches, ghosts and demons slip through the gap and get up to all kinds of mischief in our world. The antidote is to make lots of noise, to scare away any malevolent creature that might try to get through.
