As the traveling brass band ended San Giovanni Lipioni’s annual holiday concert with a rendition of Wham’s “Last Christmas,” the gray-haired villagers seated in the old church of the central Italian hill town gazed dotingly at the few young children clapping to the music. “Today there is a little movement,” Cesarina Falasco, 73, said from the back pew. It’s different.”San Giovanni Lipioni used to be known — if at all — for the discovery in its countryside of a third-century B.C. Samnite bronze head, a rare Waldesian Evangelical community and an ancient annual pageant with pagan roots that venerates a circular cane garlanded in wild cyclamen flowers. (“It represents the female genital organ,” said a tourism official, Mattia Rossi.)

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Persons: Giovanni Lipioni’s, Wham’s, dotingly, Cesarina, Giovanni Lipioni, ”, Mattia Rossi Organizations: “