On one very early June morning when I was younger, I heard my mom talking with her sister in Italy over the phone.
I could hear bits and pieces of their conversation:
“How did we do that when we were younger?” “What kind of bottle?” “Does it have to be glass?”
The one-sided conversation piqued my interest. What were they talking about? When mom got off the phone I asked what that was all about and she told me we were going to attempt La Barca di San Pietro (the boat of St Peter).
Well, that made me even more curious.
The northern Italian tradition of the Boat of St. Peter
The Boat of St Peter is an old northern Italian rural tradition, particularly from certain northern regions (my family originated in the Veneto region).
On June 28th, the eve of the feast day of Sts Peter and Paul, you place a bottle outside, filled with water and an egg white, and in the morning of the 29th of June you would see something that resembles a boat with sails.
The old legend is that St Peter, the fisherman of souls, would blow into the containers of devoted people, creating what looks like sails in the water with egg white.
Farmers would also use this as a sort of weather predictor, depending on how the sails turned out in the morning.
Getting ready on the night before the Feast
Once mom explained the tradition to me, we began by gathering the supplies.
- a glass container with a wide base
- water
- the white of a room temperature egg
On June 28th, we filled the glass container ¾ of the way full of water and in a separate bowl we separated the yolk of the egg from the white.
Once that was separated, we slowly added the egg white – careful not to break it apart – to the glass container filled with water, that was it!
Story continues after this module
I asked mom, “what do we do now and what do we do with the yolk?” She said the yolk we would cook and eat and the container we would carefully set on the window sill of an open window, uncovered, untouched (once again being careful to not shake the container too much while setting it on the sill), and just wait until the morning.
How suspenseful this was to me! What would I see in the morning?
Predicting the weather?
How did the farmers predict the weather based on the sails?
Overnight, the egg whites crystallize and create filaments that look like the sails of a boat. In the morning, farmers would go and look at their container, and if the sails looked wide and open, then it would indicate sunny days, a good indicator of an abundant harvest. If the sails appeared closed, then it would indicate rain and bad weather.
The scientific explanation for this tradition is the fluctuating temperatures between night and day during those first few days of summer and the humidity in the air. This creates the perfect environment for the egg white to rise slowly in the water, creating the filaments which resemble the sails of a boat.
Looking for the boat
On the morning of June 28th, I ran to look at our container and our sails appeared to be closed. I was fascinated by what I saw but mom was a bit disappointed as she remembered as a child seeing more of the boat. Over the course of the day, the egg white would slowly clump, dissolve and then disappear.
Days passed, and mom would call my aunt again to tell her our Barca di San Pietro experience. They would talk about their childhood experiences and what they remembered about the Barca di San Pietro, and then the conversation would trail off to something else.
For a few years, we attempted St Peter’s boat, and then the tradition was forgotten because our lives became busier, and the feast day would get missed because we would remember on the actual feast day and not the eve of.
The tradition was almost completely forgotten as mom has passed away and I forgot about it.
Then a few years ago, fragmented memories came back, and I asked my adult kids if Nonna or I ever did a boat in a bottle with them? They had no idea what I was talking about, so I began recollecting my faded memories of St Peter’s boat and eventually filled in the forgotten details with my aunt in Italy so an almost lost tradition has resurfaced.
We will be doing it again this year for the second time!
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