Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that the Vatican’s Nativity was sculpted from beach sand. It was made in 2018, not last year.

Modern Art ???

Suze it seems mighty strange to me and I wonder what the hell it really means when you look into it, it looks symbolic to me

Thank you PlanB ... a very interesting history of how the scenes are selected described in your link ...

Every year, the Vatican unveils a different Nativity scene, usually donated by an Italian town, to be displayed next to the ancient obelisk in the centre of St. Peter’s Square.

The artists behind the 2018 Nativity sculpted the holy family, the Magi, angels and donkeys out of 720 tons of beach sand. In 2016, the display featured a Maltese fishing boat to evoke the travails of refugees. The one in 2017 highlighted works of mercy with a man visiting a prison cell and another burying a shrouded body, complete with a dangling pale arm.

This year the Vatican went in another direction, toward Castelli, a town in the Abruzzo region of central-eastern Italy known for centuries for its ceramics. Between 1965 and 1975, students and teachers at a local art school there sought to revive that tradition by using ancient coiling techniques — rings of ceramic stacked in sections like marble columns — to create more than 50 Christmas-themed figures. They graced Rome’s Trajan Markets in 1970, and made it to Jerusalem in 1976. They survived earthquakes in 2009 and 2016, and a bad snowstorm in 2017.

Finally, this year, they made it to the big show, the “churchyard of Christianity,” as the crèche’s official description put it.