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Seven men — three generations of Brooklyn-bred Italian-Americans — climbed up and down a 72-foot tall aluminum spire as they hoisted a statue of San Paolino, an Italian saint, by rope and pulley to the very top.

“I haven’t been this anxious since my wife was in labor,” said Mark Mascioli, 43, as he watched from the ground.

“She was the one doing all the work on that day — what’d you do?” another man shouted down, working the crowd that had gathered Saturday on the corner of Havemeyer and North Ninth Street in Brooklyn to prepare for the Feast of Our Lady Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola.

Onlookers in their 70s and 80s watched from the sidewalk, unamused. Young children, unaware , climbed an empty sausage-and-pepper stand, waiting for their fathers and grandfathers to complete construction of the festival’s iconic pillar: the giglio.