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With the Ferragosto holiday just two weeks away, Italians are relaxing into vacation mode on beaches and in the mountains, but also at home -- and indeed especially at home. As the research institute Dempolis statistics show, one out of five Italians is vacating, so to speak, at home, while at least half are going no farther afield than their own region. Resorts and even big city parks are jam packed, and not only with the multitude of foreign tourists who prefer holidaying in Italy to some of its more turbulent neighbors.

Although in Italy the December holiday season is commonly called "Christmas Holidays", its traditions are far from being merely religious.Christian, pagan and lay themes are indeed strictly interwoven. This is visible even in the Presepe (Crèche), whose origins go back to St. Francis who staged the first living Nativity Scene back in 1223.

Naples is the quintessential Christmas town, and for many families its Nativity scenes - presepi - represent an accumulation of decades of collecting. The whole street of San Gregorio Armeno, in the heart of old Napoli, is a file of storefronts jammed with Nativity figures. But for 28 years another custom has developed: the wishes people of all ages attach to the 24-foot-tall fir tree known as the "Tree of Desires" in the elegant turn-of-the-century Galleria Umberto I. Their wishes are a slice of Neapolitan life.