What people here still do

Catania's Sant'Agata falls on 3–5 February, and the city does not seriously attempt anything else that week.

Fifteen candelore go out — carved wooden towers weighing between two hundred and nearly a thousand kilos, each on the shoulders of four to twelve men. They do not simply advance. They perform the annacata, a rocking along the length of the tower combined with a turn about its own axis, which is both how you move a tonne of timber through a packed street and, quite openly, showing off.

The fercolo carries a silver reliquary bust made in 1376. The men who pull it wear the sacco: white cotton, a black velvet skullcap, a cord at the waist, white gloves, and a white handkerchief held up and waved. The cathedral opens at two in the morning on the 4th, mass is at six, and the fercolo leaves around seven to follow the line of the medieval walls. It is out for the better part of twenty-four hours.

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The other fixed point is ferragosto on 15 August: the coast fills through the week around it, and so do the inland towns — shops shut, patron feasts run, and the emigrants come home.

Easter itself moves between late March and late April, and the week of it books out along the coast, in the Baroque towns, and inland at Enna and Caltanissetta, which carry their own processions through the interior.

Palermo's saint is Rosalia. Plague arrived on a ship from Tunis in May 1624; her bones were found in a cave on Monte Pellegrino that July, the Senate made her patron within a fortnight, and when her remains were carried through the city the following June the epidemic ended. On the night of 3 September people still climb the mountain to her sanctuary, a good number of them barefoot.

At Trapani the Misteri leave church at two o'clock on Good Friday and are still out a full day later, back only on the Saturday afternoon: twenty groups of carved figures, carried at the shoulder with that same rocking gait, timed to funeral marches by the craft guilds who own them.

At Piana degli Albanesi, founded by Albanians in 1488, Holy Week is Byzantine rite sung in Greek and Albanian; the bells stay silent on Good Friday and wooden clappers are used instead, and on Easter Sunday red eggs are blessed and handed round the piazza. At Prizzi, two masked devils and a figure of Death spend Easter morning trying to stop the risen Christ and the Madonna from meeting in the square.

A sanctuary front seen looking steeply up from its forecourt: pale ochre plaster with dark green louvred shutters, a white carved stone aedicule over the entrance holding a statue under a cross, and a clock and open bell tower at the left. Immediately to the right, bare grey-white limestone cliff rises straight out of the roofline, with scrubby bushes clinging to the ledges. Open full screenA close view of the carved and painted wooden hand of a life-size figure: the palm pierced by a nail wound, the fingers hanging open, emerging from a white lace cuff against out-of-focus white linen and dark red-and-gold brocade. Open full screenA hillside town seen from across a valley: dense terracotta-tiled roofs and pale stucco houses stacked down the slope, a wooded green hill rising behind, and on the ridge line a long ochre monastery-church block with a small square bell tower among umbrella pines. Open full screenTwo masked figures seen close: glossy red tin masks with gaping grins and blunt teeth, curved cattle horns, one hooded in dark curly fleece and one in white sheepskin, red sackcloth tunics and black leather gloves, with a third mask at the left edge and a pale village facade behind. Open full screen

The opera dei pupi is armoured knights, Saracen champions, and a great deal of edged weaponry, and it split early into two schools that do not agree about anything.

Palermo's puppets are smaller and lighter, jointed at the knee so they can kneel, and the puparo works at stage level from the wings with his arm out. Catania's are far bigger and heavier, with rigid limbs, worked from a bridge above and behind a wide, shallow stage. Both hang from an iron rod through the head, hooked at the top so a knight can be left hanging mid-scene while his opponent talks.

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The repertoire came out of one book: Giusto Lo Dico's Storia dei Paladini di Francia, which put the Carolingian cycle into order around 1860. Pupari worked through it nightly, an episode at a time, and audiences came back the way people come back to a serial.

UNESCO listed it in 2001 and again in 2008, and its own assessment is blunt: puppeteers can no longer live on the work, and playing to tourists instead of neighbours has cost the shows their quality.

Sicilian holds the ISO code scn, which classes it as a language rather than a variety of Italian. Italian law does not agree. Law 482/1999 protects twelve historic minority languages — Albanian and Greek among them — and Sicilian is not one, so the Arbëresh of Piana degli Albanesi has protection that the island's own language does not.

It reads like a receipt for the conquests. Arabic gave zibibbu, zàgara and gèbbia. Greek gave babbiari for messing about, and probably carusu for a boy — the dictionaries have argued over that one for a century. Norman French left accattari, to buy, and ammucciari, to hide. Catalan left addunarisi, to notice. Spanish left lastima, a pity.

It also went first. At Frederick II's court, between roughly 1230 and 1266, the Scuola siciliana wrote over three hundred love poems and made Sicilian the first Italic vernacular used as a literary language — the sonnet appears to have been invented there. Then Tuscan copyists rewrote the poems into their own vowels, which broke every rhyme. The reconstructions we read now are guesses at what the originals sounded like.

The marranzanu is a steel frame with a single free tongue. You set it against your incisors and pluck it, and the note changes because your mouth changes shape, not because the instrument does. The friscalettu is a small flute cut from the giant cane that grows in every Sicilian ditch, and shepherds made their own.

The work songs are harder listening. Tuna crews sang the cialoma as they hauled, one man calling the line and the rest answering, so the pull came on the beat. In the sulphur mines the carusi — boys of seven and eight, on shifts that rarely came in under twelve hours — had songs of their own; two Tuscans who paid their own way round the island wrote the conditions down in 1876, and Verga turned it into fiction two years later. Alberto Favara went out with a notebook from 1898 and collected more than a thousand melodies. They were not published until 1957, thirty-four years after he died.

Vincenzo Bellini was born in Catania in 1801 and dead outside Paris at thirty-three, having written ten operas. The first night of Norma at La Scala went badly enough that the line calling it a fiasco three times over has never stopped being quoted — though it reaches us through a friend known to have retouched his letters. Catania opened its opera house in 1890 and named it after him, and the first thing it staged was Norma. Palermo's Teatro Massimo, the largest in Italy by floor area, opened seven years later, then shut in 1974 and stayed shut for twenty-three years.

Two modern voices, both worth an evening. Rosa Balistreri had no schooling, went north as a domestic servant, and was put on a stage for the first time at thirty-nine by Dario Fo; she sang in Sicilian about poverty and injustice in a voice like a door dragging. And Franco Battiato, born on this coast in 1945, made the first Italian album to sell a million, recorded in Sicilian and in Arabic, and then came home to Milo on the flank of Etna, where he died in 2021.

The main front of an opera house seen head-on: six Corinthian columns carrying a pediment whose architrave is incised with a motto, a bronze lion on a stone plinth at the left of the stairs, a tall wrought-iron lamp standard at the centre, terracotta pots of small palms along the top landing, and the first flight of the entrance steps across the bottom edge. Open full screenA half-length painted portrait of a young man with dark curly hair and side-whiskers, arms folded, in a black high-collared double-breasted coat over a white stock, leaning against a stone parapet, with an evening landscape of dark trees and blue hills behind him. Open full screen

At Caltagirone a staircase was cut in 1606 to join the old town to the new, levelled into a hundred and forty-two steps in 1844, and faced from 1954 with hand-painted maiolica on every riser. The patterns climb in chronological order — Arab, Norman, Swabian, Aragonese, Spanish — so you walk up through the history in the order it happened.

Sicily on film is mostly Sicilians. Visconti shot La terra trema at Aci Trezza in 1948 with fishermen instead of actors; they spoke Sicilian and no Italian, so a voice-over had to be added for the rest of the country. Antonioni lost L'avventura's crew on a rock off Panarea for three days without food, and had the film booed at Cannes before it took the Jury Prize. Tornatore shot Nuovo Cinema Paradiso in a square at Palazzo Adriano and won the Oscar.

And on paper: Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo was turned down by two publishers and came out in 1958, a year after he died. It sold a quarter of a million copies inside eight months and took the Strega the year after.

A single long flight of steps climbing between tall ochre houses with iron balconies and potted plants, every riser faced in blue, yellow and white patterned maiolica — the patterns crisp on the near steps and compressing into stripes towards the top. Visitors stand across the lowest flights and a few more sit and climb higher up, and a hard diagonal shadow crosses the upper flights. Open full screenA small wooden fishing boat, white with a blue sheer stripe, moored over clear green water and seen from directly above. Its mooring line runs off to a rock at the top right; bench thwarts and floorboards show inside, and the rocky bottom is visible through the water beneath it. Open full screenA stone archway under a thick canopy of vine leaves, with BAR VITELLI painted in tall dark letters curving across the rendered wall above it. An iron wall lantern hangs to the left of the arch, a man in a pale T-shirt stands beside the opening and a second man’s head and shoulders fill the bottom of the frame. Through the doorway, a dim room with framed photographs on the walls. Open full screenA pale stone church front photographed from below and to one side. Heavy flat pilasters divide it into two storeys, the upper carrying a window under a triangular pediment and the lower a tall rectangular doorway with dark wooden doors. The top of the gable is finished with a row of square battlements and an iron cross, with two tall stone cones at the corners. Open full screenA wide, pale-paved open square edged with low walls and tiled roofs, with four tall palm trees. At its far edge stands a block of rough stone masonry pierced by a single wide, flattened archway with a row of stubby rounded stone knobs along the top; through the arch the ground falls away to a hazy sea horizon. Open full screen