June 24th marks the feast of San Giovanni Battista, or Saint John the Baptist, the prophet, often depicted in a camel’s hair robe, subsisting in the wild on locusts and wild honey, who baptized Jesus. In Italy, the ritual of creating acqua di San Giovanni (water of Saint John) falls on the eve, June 23rd, as do other traditions associated with another cleansing element, fire. From bonfires to races where participants run with torches (in parts of Sardinia, they jump over fire), both of these elements—water and fire—represent purification and cleansing, just as through baptism, San Giovanni purified and cleansed Christ. They point to the healing of both spiritual and physical ailments.
In addition to water and fire, the feast is associated with magic, love, marriage, healing, beauty, moonlight, flowers, herbs—the earthly and elemental, the transcendent and the wild. If you’re not Catholic, think of this ritual as a way to mark the summer solstice (today, June 21st) and the entrance into the thick of the summer season, as San Giovanni, born midway through summer, marks our entrance into warmer days, when the earth is its most fertile.
But after the summer solstice, the hours of light actually begin to shorten, although we don’t notice it for sometime; so that this feast also marks the march toward the shortest day (winter solstice, December 21st) exactly six months later, which of course is when Jesus is born. “He [Jesus] must increase,” Saint John says in John 3:30, “but I must decrease.” Six months from today Jesus is born, as is winter, when the cycle will begin again, and we slowly come out of the darkness, with the hours of light lengthening once more.
With remnants of pre-Christian, pagan elements, the feast and its accompanying ritual of foraging and creating infused water, harnesses the power of plants, now at their peak fecundity, for blessing and protection. As with most traditions, there are variations in different regions, but the ingredients for acqua di San Giovanni are always collected in the evening on June 23rd, usually by a woman, preferably one who has fasted. The process is pretty simple, and I’ll walk you through it below.