One week, and no two towns the same

Everything here is fixed to a Sunday that moves. Easter can fall anywhere from late March to late April, so Good Friday travels with it, and so does everything counted from it. Nothing below has a calendar date, and nothing below needs one.

It is the densest week in the Sicilian year and it is not one tradition. The west carries Spanish forms brought under the viceroyalty; the interior keeps hooded confraternities and mountain routes; the south-east splits towns in two and makes them compete. A town forty minutes from another does something unrecognisable.

Twenty things go out on Good Friday: eighteen sculptural groups of the Passion, plus the dead Christ in his urn and the Madonna Addolorata. They are wood, canvas and glue — legno, tela e colla — built by Trapanese workshops in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and dressed in worked silver.

Open full screen

Each group belongs to a trade rather than to a parish. Goldsmiths hold the Separation, fishermen the Washing of the Feet, blacksmiths the Arrest, barbers the Denial of Peter, masons the Flagellation, salt workers the Carrying to the Tomb. The arrangement is not frozen in some medieval past: painters joined the ropemakers in 1966, and groups have changed hands more than once since.

The bearers are the massari, and they do not walk. The group is rocked left and right while it advances — three steps forward and two back, timed to the funeral marches of the band behind it. A wooden clapper called the ciaccola gives the orders to lift and to halt, and only the group's caporale may strike it.

A black and white photograph taken from below and very close: several hands gripping a long wooden carrying beam, wrists and forearms in dark sleeves, with three men’s faces visible between the arms, one looking straight into the lens. Banks of white flowers fill the space above them. Open full screenLow golden light down a narrow street of tall shuttered buildings, a baroque church front closing the far end. A gilt urn with a domed lid and a finial is carried above a dense crowd of people in dark clothes, with black-draped standards leaning in at the left edge. Open full screen

Open full screen

Enna stands at 931 metres, the highest provincial capital in Italy, with fewer than twenty-five thousand residents. On Good Friday the procession is seen from above, from the streets climbing behind it, as a line of light working through the town.

Sixteen confraternities walk, and they walk in the order each was founded. The column is therefore a readable diagram of five centuries of one small town's institutions, oldest first.

Open full screen

The habit is the same shape for all of them and a different colour for each: a white camice belted with a cord, a scapular, a coloured mantellina whose dialect name comes from the Spanish mantilla, white gloves, the hood with its visor down, and a crown of plaited withy standing for the crown of thorns.

Open full screen

The Anime Sante del Purgatorio wear a black scapular and mantle with a skull and crossed bones embroidered on them, and carry silver maces by a right granted in a royal decree of 1789. The procession goes out to the municipal cemetery, where the blessing is given with a sixteenth-century silver reliquary cross holding one of the thorns behind glass, and comes back after dark.

Caltanissetta does not have one rite, it has four, spread across four days, and each belongs to a different set of people. That is the honest way to describe its scale — better than any crowd figure, none of which exists.

On Holy Wednesday morning the Real Maestranza parades: the city's trade guilds, in a body, under a captain who is drawn from a different trade each year. The crown granted them the title Real in 1806. That evening the Varicedde go out — miniature versions of the big groups, begun by apprentices who were shut out of the main procession.

Holy Thursday is the sixteen Vare, through the night. Fifteen of them are the work of Francesco Biangardi, a Neapolitan sculptor who came to the town during the sulphur boom, and his son Vincenzo, made between 1883 and 1902; the sixteenth was ordered from Naples in 1853 by the masons' union. They are wood, papier-mâché and heavy canvas stiffened with gesso.

Open full screen

Each one belongs to a trade in the same way. The Last Supper measures roughly five metres by three by two, carries thirteen figures and cost two thousand eight hundred lire in 1885; the Veronica of 1883 cost nine hundred, paid for by the sulphur miners of one pit. They were carried on shoulders until the middle of the 1960s, when wheeled carriages went under them — before that, one group took about two hundred men.

Good Friday, after dark, is the Cristo Nero, and it belongs to the Fogliamari, the gatherers of wild greens. They carry a blackened crucifix barefoot and sing their own laments in dialect.

The strangest object of the week is at Pietraperzia on Good Friday. A cypress beam eight and a half metres long — cut to thirty-three Sicilian palms, and made in 1905 after the previous one broke during the procession the year before — stands upright on its platform, about nine metres in all, with a small wooden crucifix at the top.

From an iron ring under the crucifix hang some hundred and fifty strips of white linen, a little over thirty metres each, held at their ends by the people of the town. The oldest with a year embroidered on it reads 1888, and the confraternity's register of who holds which runs back to the 1870s. They pass down inside families.

The linen has an origin the confraternity records and nobody else prints. It was cloth given to the foundling wheel, blessed at the crucifix and then cut into lengths to swaddle abandoned infants. What the bands do now is balance the mast — about eighty bearers carry it on poles underneath, and the linen is not what holds it up, whatever the photographs suggest.

Piana degli Albanesi was founded in 1488 by Albanians fleeing the Ottoman advance, on church land, under terms granted by the archbishop of Monreale. It keeps the Byzantine rite and it keeps two liturgical languages, Greek and Albanian.

Its week opens a day early, on Lazarus Saturday. On Good Friday the bells stay silent and wooden clappers are used instead; Albanian funeral laments are sung in procession around the Epitafios. On Easter Sunday red eggs are blessed and handed round the square, and the women come out in the worked costumes their families keep.

Open full screen

Easter Sunday is not quiet. At Prizzi, from first light, devils in red and a figure of Death in ochre work the streets, stopping passers-by and releasing them for a coin. Their masks are about half a metre long, with two horns and a fleece backing that is what actually holds them on — one white, one black. The material has changed twice in the record: cardboard, then leather, now sheet metal.

Open full screen

What they are trying to do is stop the risen Christ and the Madonna from meeting in the square. Two angels with drawn swords break them, and the meeting happens. Giuseppe Pitrè wrote the Prizzi encounter down in 1881, which is as far back as the printed record goes — it is described as ancient a great deal more often than it is dated.

Thirty-six kilometres from Catania, on Etna's western flank, Adrano does the same argument as a play. Lucifer, Beelzebub and Astaroth, Death, Humanity and an archangel work through a verse text attributed to a local priest and dated 1752, in the square between the Norman castle and the mother church, at midday. The roles are inherited inside families — fathers to sons-in-law to sons — and rehearsals start months ahead so that the children playing the sacred parts are not rushed.

At Scicli the risen Christ is not called the risen Christ. He is l'Uomo Vivo, the Living Man, and the crowd's shout is a single noun drawn out over several seconds: Gioia. The statue is wood, carved in 1796 by a Catania sculptor, and the procession is first documented in a bishop's decree of 1688.

The rule that makes it unlike anywhere else is who gets to carry. Anyone can take a turn under the poles, and the register's own description says the statue goes wherever the whim of whoever is holding it takes it. It is heaved, run and driven around the squares from midday until long after dark.

An hour west, Ispica splits the week in two and hands one day to each half of the town. The cavari wear red and own Maundy Thursday; the nunziatari wear blue and own Good Friday. That rivalry has a date behind it, which most do not: in March 1623 the nobles of the castle quarter commissioned a Christ of their own, specifically to process against the one belonging to the people of the gorge.

And the meeting itself — the 'ncontru, when the risen Christ and his mother are brought face to face in the square — is not a Prizzi speciality at all. Modica, Troina, Comiso, Nicosia, Petralia Sottana and scores of other towns do a version of it on the same morning. Prizzi is simply the one where somebody fights it.