Every town keeps its own day

The biggest thing Catania does. Carved and gilded towers go ahead of the shrine, each belonging to a trade; the shrine itself runs on rollers and is hauled by two cords of about a hundred and thirty metres. The city shuts for it.

The floats are built in cartone romano, paper laid in strict layers over plaster casts, which flexes where ordinary papier-mâché cracks. The evidence for its age is better than the usual adjectives: a payment order of 1594 settles a bill for a carnival already held, and in 1612 the court banned throwing oranges at people.

Everywhere else in Sicily the carnival artistry is papier-mâché on wheels. Here it is textile, carried on a person. Named associations — Turi Campanazza, La Smorfia, La Burla — compete, and the organisers say a costume can take months and weigh over forty kilos. There is a museum in town that keeps them out of season.

Nobody speaks a line. A wooden castle is built in the square, standing in for a real palace in Palermo, and about a hundred costumed townspeople move to a drum. The Mastro is beaten in the first act and wins in the second — an ending that inverts the history it is drawn from.

The wheel is aged maiorchino, about thirty-five centimetres across, and it is launched with a tarred shoemaker's cord snapped taut around its rim. The rules are on the comune's own site: no run-up, one captain per team may argue with the judges, and if the wheel shatters the point is marked where the largest piece stops.

The bread is modelled into keys, scissors, crosses, doves, fish and working tools, and banked up on shelves under white cloths bound with laurel and myrtle. The meal served alongside it is meatless. The blessed bread itself is kept rather than eaten — held in the house, in the sources' own words, like relics.

The cloaks are made from Matthiola incana heads pressed into patterns on a palm-frond backing, and the ride goes through the streets after dark between fires. The date rule printed in the regional register is contradicted by most recent editions, so this is one to check with the comune before booking.

Groups come from twenty-odd countries and compete before a jury for a gold, silver and bronze temple. A friendship torch is lit at the foot of the Temple of Concordia, a ceremony that dates from 1956. It was conceived in 1934 and first held in 1937 as a showcase for Sicilian produce — a tourism invention, and none the worse for it.

Twenty groups of figures shouldered through Trapani from Good Friday afternoon into the next morning. Sixteen hooded brotherhoods at Enna walking in order of foundation. Four separate rites on four days at Caltanissetta, each owned by different people. Devils losing an argument at Prizzi and Adrano on Easter Sunday.

Sixteen panels, chalked onto the paving through the preceding week and filled with petals and peat overnight on the Friday by more than two hundred people. The street climbs between carved balconies to a church that closes the view, which is why this one outgrew the dozens of other flower carpets on the island.

Walkers set out from Catania at sea level and arrive at a sanctuary at 586 metres before dawn, coming in from eight named Etna towns. Those at the front are i nuri — bare feet, stripped to the waist. The vow being discharged has its own word, a prummisioni.

They come on foot from Carlentini, Palazzolo Acreide, Augusta, Siracusa, Floridia, Solarino, Sortino and Villasmundo, and the basilica opens at four in the morning. The dress is white with a red sash across chest and hips, barefoot, flowers in hand. There is a sister church in Connecticut, built in 1931 to this basilica's design.

The two halves of Ragusa were separate comuni until 1927, so the town still keeps two patrons and two constituencies — sangiorgiari below and sangiovannari above. The upper town's feast is on 29 August, the Beheading rather than the Nativity, because the grain harvest ran to mid-August. Almost every English source gets that wrong.

The fish is a strong swimmer chosen from the village, different every year. The rais directs from a rock on the shore, the crew work from a decorated boat in torn trousers and yellow sashes, and conch shells are blown between water and land. The hunt fails, the crew fall out, the boat goes over.

Mortars, bells and 'nzareddi — coloured paper ribbons fired from the upper storeys — go off together, and for several seconds there is nothing to see. The bearers wear white singlets and red scarves. Children, from newborns upward, are handed up onto the bier.

Plague came off a ship in 1624; her bones were found on Monte Pellegrino that July and the Senate made her patron within a fortnight. The silver ark that holds them was made between 1631 and 1637 and is what goes through the city on the 15th. What is eaten is the part nobody writes down: babbaluci, snails with garlic and parsley, sfincione, and calia e simenza.

The hook every English page reaches for — loaves thrown from the balconies onto the statue — is forbidden by the diocese, and the ban has been restated. The bread is blessed and given to the soup kitchens instead, and the bearers have asked publicly for the old rite back. A tradition being argued over in public is alive in a way a preserved one is not.

Each lamp is a terracotta dish with a cotton wick standing in sand, inside a hand-cut coloured paper shade — a coppo, which is paper and not a roof tile, whatever machine translation tells you. Several thousand are set out on the treads by day, filled from a long-spouted can, and lit at a signal. They burn until the oil runs out.

Some thirteen metres of tiered machine running on metal runners, hauled by hemp hawsers over a hundred metres long. Read from the bottom it is a diagram of the heavens, with gearing inside the frame turning figures on the upper stages. The hardest moment of the day is the turn out of one street into another. Two giants, Mata and Grifone, go through the city in the days before.

Monte in yellow, Castellina in blue, Canali in red, Casalotto in green. The prize is not a banner: the winning quarter's church keeps an old image of the Madonna for the year. Canali have won six times in seventy-one runnings. It is a civic re-enactment got up in the 1950s, and useful mostly because your mosaics day may fall on it.

Kronos and Mytia go round the streets for days beforehand, dancing and taking offerings, and bow when the Madonna comes up out of the cemetery church below the town. Messina's giants are wheeled; these are shouldered. It is not the town's patronal feast — that is San Sebastiano in January.

Nothing like the July feast, and quieter for it. The sanctuary is built over the cave where the bones were found in 1624, with bare limestone cliff rising straight out of its roofline.

The crops arrive in order as the month goes on: grapes, then honey, then Etna apples, then mushrooms and chestnuts. It is a municipal market fair rather than a harvest rite, and it has run for more than forty years. The date rule is the best on the island — it resolves itself from any calendar, forever.

The crop is biennial — odd years only, picked entirely by hand, with the trees rested in between. That is why the dates move: they follow ripening on the lava, not a calendar, and the town fixes them late. Held every autumn since 1990 apart from the two pandemic years.

Forty-eight men in green velvet caps, an elderly bearer with a handbell setting the pace, and a niche with five locks whose five keyholders cannot open it alone. The shout when she comes out is Sarausana jè — she is Syracusan. There is a second, much quieter feast in May.