Easter Traditions in Italy

Settimana Santa in Sicily is a week-long explosion of processions, representations and ritual that draws on layers of Greek, Byzantine, Arab and Spanish influence accumulated over three millennia of occupation and exchange to form something uniquely Sicilian.

The tradition of the Spanish-influenced processione dei Misteri – the procession of the Mysteries, in which enormous, elaborately carved and painted wooden statues depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ are carried through the streets on the shoulders of confraternity members – is the visual heart of Sicilian Holy Week.

The greatest of these is at Trapani, where twenty heavy groups of statues known as the Misteri, some dating to the 17th century and each a masterwork of Baroque craftsmanship, are carried through the streets of the city in a procession that begins on Good Friday afternoon and continues uninterrupted until the following morning.

The bearers, known as massari, move in a characteristic, rhythmic swaying known as the annacata; following the tempo of the funeral marches played by the bands behind them, it has an almost hypnotic effect. The sound of the wooden ciaccole (a kind of castanet made exclusively by hand in Trapani) marks each slow step.

People line the streets through the night, grandmothers in folding chairs, children asleep on shoulders, the whole town awake and watching. Only when the head of the massari sounds the final beat of the ciaccola after the group finally arrives back in the church on Easter Satuday are the processional statues laid to earth once more, 24 hours after they had first been raised.

High in the island’s mountainous interior, Enna – its streets still cold even in April – plays host to a Good Friday procession featuring over two thousand members of the city’s ancient confraternities, each dressed in the colours and costume of their guild, their faces hooded.

They carry the twenty-five symbols of the Martyrdom of Christ through the streets, and they walk in striking silence for the duration of the ceremony, accompanied only by sorrowful music performed by the marching band behind them.

At the center of the procession is the spectacular urna del Cristo morto, an imposing reliquary containing a representation of Christ’s lifeless body that is carried aloft by dozens of participants on a mighty wooden bier.

It’s a fascinating sight: two thousand hooded figures, the medieval streets, the candlelight, and the rhythmic sound of the slow march of feet on stone.

Cross the strait of Messina to the toe of the Italian peninsula and the character of Holy Week shifts again, becoming darker and more physically visceral in a landscape of wild mountains and ancient communities.

The central drama of the Calabrian Easter is the affruntata, or the encounter, a ceremony of extraordinary theatrical power that takes place in town squares across the region on Easter Sunday morning. The word describes the moment when the processing statue of the Risen Christ meets the statue of the Sorrowful Virgin.

The Virgin’s black mourning robes are stripped from her as she sees her son alive: the joy of the resurrection expressed not in words but in tangible, physical gesture.

The origins of the tradition are Spanish and date to the 16th century, but in Calabria it has acquired its own intensely local character, where the statues are carried by men who have trained for this moment all year and who take the weight and the responsibility of the encounter with complete seriousness.

At Nocera Terinese, on Holy Saturday, a tradition of an entirely different kind survives: the Vattienti, in which men process through the streets performing ritual self-flagellation in an act of collective, bloody devotion that might seem barbaric to our modern eyes.

Certainly it’s confronting, and not for everyone. But it’s also a profoundly sincere, if extreme, expression of the penitential impulse that runs through all of Settimana Santa.

In the towns and villages of Puglia, Lent begins not with the imposition of ashes but with the appearance of a mysterious figure. She is hung from balconies and stretched across the narrow streets on washing lines, an elderly woman dressed in rags.

This is the Quarantana, the widow of Carnival, and she has been watching over the forty days of Lent in this part of the world for longer than anyone can precisely say. Her symbolism is dense and tangled. The Quarantana is Carnival’s wife, mourning her husband’s death at the end of the festive season. She carries a spindle, emblem of the passage of time and the labour of women.

On her head she wears seven feathers – one for each week of Lent – or holds a pomegranate with seven feathers stuck into it, the fruit representing the winter that is ending. She has a single white feather among the others, representing Easter itself. And on each Sunday in Lent, one feather is removed.

Rome has been the capital of Easter for two thousand years — which means, among other things, that it has had more time than anywhere else to develop its own particular relationship with the season, simultaneously grand and intimate, theatrical and sincere.

The great public ceremonies – the Papal Mass in St Peter’s Square, the torchlit Via Crucis at the Colosseum on Good Friday evening – are experiences of a scale that no other city in the world can offer: hundreds of thousands of people gathered in spaces of breathtaking beauty participating in ceremonies whose essential forms have been observed since the earliest centuries of the Church.

There is nothing else quite like the Easter Sunday Urbi et Orbi, the Pope’s address to Rome and to the world delivered from the central balcony of St Peter’s, the great square below him full to the edges and the broadcast reaching hundreds of millions of people simultaneously. You don’t have to be a believer to be impressed.

There is an old Venetian proverb that announces Easter with characteristic directness: Xè Pasqua, xè Pasqua che caro che gò, se magna ea fugassa, se beve i cocò – ‘It’s Easter, it’s Easter, and I am so happy; we eat the focaccia and we drink the eggs.’

The sentiment is typical of a city that has always found its deepest pleasures in the immediate and the sensory: food, the company of friends, the return of the light after winter.

For centuries the centrepiece of the Venetian Easter was not a procession or a ceremony in the piazza but an act of ducal devotion. On Easter Sunday morning, the Doge and his dignitaries would process from the Palazzo Ducale to the church of San Zaccaria. There he was received by the abbess of the adjacent convent and her nuns, who presented him with a gilded ducal cap known as the corno ducale in an exchange that formalised the ancient relationship between the republic and one of its oldest religious houses.

The church of San Zaccaria is still there; its magnificent 15th-century facade by Mauro Codussi is one of the finest examples of Venetian Renaissance architecture, and Giovanni Bellini’s luminous Sacro Conversazione hangs in the north aisle within, painted in 1505 for this very space.

The Easter Mass at the Basilica of San Marco too retains something of this old ceremonial grandeur. To sit in the golden interior of the Basilica on Easter Sunday morning, with the mosaics catching the candle light as they have for nine centuries and the music from the ancient choir of San Marco filtering through the church, is unforgettable.

The processions and ceremonies of Holy Week are just one side of the Easter story in Italy. Just as important, you guessed it, is its food! In fact, the two are more closely connected than they might appear. The rhythms of the Lenten fast have profoundly shaped what gets eaten at Easter: foods banned during those 40 days of abstinence are now suddenly, joyfully permitted.

As with other parts of the Christian world, lamb is central everywhere. The symbolism of the lamb at Easter is ancient and layered: the Passover lamb of the Old Testament, the Lamb of God of the New, the actual spring lamb of the Italian countryside arriving in the markets at precisely this moment of the year.

In Rome it’s called abbacchio – milk-fed spring lamb from the Castelli Romani, roasted with potatoes and rosemary or grilled scottadito style over charcoal. In Sardinia it is agnello in umido, braised slowly with artichokes and wild fennel. In Sicily it appears alongside pasta or in the guise of marzipan confections known as pecorelle di pasta reale, little lambs of almond paste.

Eggs are the other universal presence – hard-boiled, decorated, and hidden in Easter breads given to children. The Easter eggs of the Italian tradition predate their chocolate descendants by millennia: the ancient Romans gave painted eggs as gifts at spring festivals, and the early Church absorbed the symbolism of the egg as rebirth directly into the Easter celebration. The chocolate Easter eggs that we know around the world are a 20th-century Italian elaboration of a practice that goes back to the empire.