The trumpet sounded three sharp blasts. The band stopped. The crowd went quiet — the kind of quiet that comes just before something begins, or just before something gives.
Then the command, first in dialect, then in English:
“Aizati i spalli! Lift your shoulders!”
“Accongi i cosce! Tighten your legs!”
“Alza! Lift!”
A collective grunt as one hundred and twenty-eight men pushed upward, muscles straining, faces contorted. For a terrible moment, nothing happened. Six tons of wood and plaster and painted saints pressed down on their backs, and the weight wouldn’t yield. Then — gradually, with a groan that seemed to come from the earth itself — the tower inched off the ground.
The Giglio rose.
That scene sits at the emotional center of Book Two of The Promise Trilogy, and writing it nearly broke me. Not because the research was difficult — the Giglio is one of the best-documented festivals in Italian-American life — but because the weight of it kept revealing itself as more than physical. The tower is heavy. But so is everything the men carrying it have been holding up all year.
The Giglio — il giglio, the lily — honors San Paolino di Nola, the fifth-century bishop who, according to tradition, offered himself as a hostage to secure the release of his people from North African captivity. When he returned home to Nola, the townspeople greeted him with lilies, and the celebration has continued for centuries. In the small towns around Naples — Nola, Brusciano, Barra — the Giglio festival involves enormous wooden towers, elaborately decorated with papier-mâché saints and musicians, carried through the streets on the shoulders of teams of men.
Italian immigrants brought the tradition to New York. In East Harlem, the Giglio became associated with Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church on 115th Street — the spiritual heart of the Italian community — from around 1908. The tower in East Harlem grew to extraordinary proportions: a multi-story structure of wood and plaster, decorated with carved saints and flowers and ribbons, topped with a band of musicians who played while the whole thing swayed through the streets.
The Giglio is still carried today — most famously in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and still in East Harlem itself — organized around parish needs and community schedules, and being named capo — leading the lift — was one of the highest honors a man could earn.
I could describe the mechanics. The paranza — the team of lifters — trains for months. The poles are distributed across shoulders according to height and strength. The capo directs with his voice and his cane, calling the commands that synchronize more than a hundred bodies into a single movement. When the tower turns — gira! — the men’s feet shuffle in unison, heels grinding into stone. When it bounces — salta! — six tons of wood dip and rise in time to the music, and the crowd loses its mind.
But the mechanics don’t explain why it matters. The Giglio matters because it’s the neighborhood made visible. Every family that contributes money, every man who trains as a lifter, every woman who prepares food for the days of celebration — they’re performing their belonging. In a community where standing was earned and reputation was everything, the Giglio was where you showed the parish who you were.
For the Santoro family in The Promise Trilogy, Papa’s appointment as numero uno capo is the culmination of years of service and sacrifice. It means the family name means something. It means they’ve arrived — not in the American sense of wealth and mobility, but in the Italian-American sense of buon nome, good name, the currency that keeps your children fed and your neighbors respectful and your enemies at a distance.
Which is why the Giglio chapters are where everything converges in Book Two — not just the spectacle, but the private grief underneath it. The tower goes up. The crowd cheers. And nobody watching can see what it costs the people carrying it.
I should tell you about the artichokes, because otherwise you’ll think I made them up.
The Terranova family in the novel shares a name with a real crime family that dominated East Harlem from the 1890s through the 1930s. The Morello-Terranova organization ran extortion, gambling, and counterfeiting operations out of the blocks around 116th Street. Ciro Terranova earned a nickname that sounds like fiction: the Artichoke King.
He cornered New York’s artichoke market, buying the small variety popular with Italian families from California suppliers and reselling them at enormous markups. Vendors who refused his prices faced consequences. In 1935, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia actually banned the sale of artichokes in New York City — showing up at the Bronx Terminal Market at dawn with a fanfare of trumpets to announce it. The ban lasted three days, just long enough to arrest the men running the racket.
In 1919, the Terranovas were consolidating power. The street tax, the protection money, the way organized crime wove itself into the daily commerce of immigrant neighborhoods — those were facts of life in East Harlem. In the novel, they’re part of the world the Santoros navigate every day: the toppled artichoke stand, the beaten vendor, the basket of apples that arrives at the family home with a single artichoke perched on top like a crown — a gift that is also a claim.
I wanted Lucie to see these things clearly enough to understand what they cost. Because the Giglio and the racket existed side by side, in the same streets, often involving the same families. The cost of becoming someone in East Harlem meant knowing which debts were visible and which were not — and which ones you were carrying whether you chose to or not.
What I kept coming back to while writing the Giglio scenes was the word carry. The men carry the tower. The women carry the food, the preparations, the family honor that the tower performance makes public. The capo carries the responsibility of every man under the poles. And underneath all of it, the community carries its own contradictions — the beauty and the racket, the faith and the fear, the tradition that holds people together and the obligations that won’t let them go.
The Giglio is still celebrated today — still carried, still heavy, still beautiful. The men who lift it still train together, argue together, and hold each other up when the weight shifts. If you’ve never seen it, I hope you will. And if you have — you already know what the tower means. Not just what it weighs, but what it holds.
The Giglio chapters sit at the center of The Promise Trilogy‘s second book because the festival is where everything the Santoro family has built becomes visible — and where everything Lucie has been hiding becomes impossible to carry alone.