Colorful and spectacular light installations are a huge thing in South Italy and especially in Apulia. Every city, lights up the streets with unique and wonderful lights during every holiday, events, and on the celebrations of the city saints.

Tradition, religion, heritage, and passion: you can discover all these things during the Summer Italy Light Festival called “Festa delle Luminarie”.

The word ‘luminaria’, coming from the Latin word lumen, refers to both the ‘object which gives out the light’ and to the ‘lights’ used for religious celebrations, consisting in oil lamps provided with lampshades, made in coloured paper.

The fairy tale atmosphere involves the town for the festival’s duration, with parades, street food, fireworks ,open air restaurants and cafes, local, regional and national delicacies that are cooked on pavement stalls.

Musicians, jugglers and entertainers perform for the exuberant crowds of people enjoying the holiday atmosphere and fun of this unforgettable Italy light festival.

A bit of history

Apulia has long been known for its celebratory attitude, and for its penchant for putting up flamboyant lights. During the 1700s, light decorations were ligneous scaffolding, but only in the 1800′s the scaffoldings came unhooked from the buildings’ front end and become self-supported powered by gas.

Today, the light decorations on the street or in the squares are the result of designers and architects’ work: the whole work is made of several pieces, from single parts and frames which can be easily mounted. Then, while the lights are in different colours, the frames are kept white to better reflect the light.

What you should not miss: Scorrano(Apulia) the World Capital of Illuminations

The Night of Lights (Notte delle Luci) is the feast held in honour of Santa Domenica, patron saint of the town, in Scorrano, 35 km from Lecce. Millions of lamps and lights are paired with futuristic technology; the event is always a huge success and about 400.000 people from all over the world come every year to witness it.

The huge structures are covered by thousands of coloured light bulbs and reproduce some of the most famous monuments in the world, such as the Colosseum, the Tower Bridge or the Eiffel Tower.The small city gained a lot of fame due to its spectacular light sculptures during the Santa Domenica day, which usually takes place every year from the 5th to the 8th of July.