The Varia of Palmi is a Roman Catholic festival held on the last Sunday of August in Palmi, a town of about 20,000 people in the region of Calabria. The town is on the west coast almost at the tip of the “toe of the boot” of Italy, only about 20 km/12 miles from the Island of Sicily. The festival is one of those in Italy that involve processions of what UNESCO calls “large shoulder-borne processional structures” and, as such, has been inscribed with others on the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) list of that organization. The town of Nola, near Naples, is also on that list with a similar procession. (See this link for a list of the others and a discussion of ICH.)(Varia is a variation of vara, also used in some parts of southern Italy. The general word in standard Italian is fercolo: a hand-carried or shoulder-borne litter or palanquin used in religious processions.)