Easter in Sicily

“What is a religious festival in Sicily? It would be easy to answer that it’s everything, but a religious celebration. first of all, it’s an existential explosion, the explosion of the collective id, in a land where the community exists at its own id level only. Since it is only during celebrations that Sicilian people leave their state of “one man” , which is then the condition of their vigilant and painful super-ego, and lastly feel as a part of a class, of a city.” “There is no place, in Sicily, where the Passion of Christ would not come alive through a real representation, where real people or statuary groups change streets and squares into a stage full of drama, where playing betrayal, murder and the pain of a mother. But is it really the drama of the son of God who became man, what is actually performed, in the Sicilian countries, on Good Friday? Or is it not rather the drama of a hurt humanity, betrayed by his neighbor, murdered by the law? Or, at last, it is not even this, and is it only the drama of a mother, the drama of the Lady of Sorrows? ” Leonardo Sciascia: Feste religiose in Sicilia (1965).

“The noisy rejoicing in the Resurrection of the Lord began at dawn: rockets, firecrackers, squibs and the like exploded in great numbers in front of the churches, while crowds of the faithful fought their way in through the open doors. Bells rang, organ pealed, processions sang in unison, priestly choirs chanted antiphonally—to ears unaccustomed to such a rowdy worship of God, the noise was quite deafening.” (J.W. Goethe: Italian Journey [1786–1788]. Translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. Penguin Books)