Sicily

Three days, two cords, and a silver shrine on rollers

Catania's own feast, on the same three dates every February whatever the weekday. What comes through the streets is pulled rather than shouldered, and the claim you will read about its size has no study behind it.

Where: Catania
When: 3–5 February, whatever the weekday
Getting in: Free, in the street

Three days in February

The feast is 3, 4 and 5 February, on those dates every year whatever the weekday, and the last round comes back on the morning of the 6th. Catania does not seriously attempt anything else that week.

Each day has its own shape. The 3rd is the offerta della cera, the wax offering, which climbs to the cathedral around midday behind the city's old ceremonial carriages, and ends with fireworks in Piazza Duomo after dark. The 4th is the giro esterno, the outer round, which follows the line of the medieval walls and is out for the better part of a day and a night. The 5th is the giro interno, through the old centre and the convents.

A dark antique carriage with large spoked wheels standing in a wide street, a coachman in a blue and gold livery coat and white periwig on the box. Strings of white filigree light frames run overhead between the buildings, a crowd in winter coats watches from the pavement, and further down the street a tall gilded tower stands among small Italian flags. — A coachman on one of the carriages that go up to the cathedral with the wax offering on the third.Effems · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Nobody has ever counted the crowd, and the figures in circulation rest on no study. What is checkable is simpler: shops shut, the buses are rerouted, and the centre belongs to the feast for three days.

Pulled, not carried

This is the thing about Sant'Agata that almost nothing written in English gets to. The fercolo is not on anyone's shoulders. It runs on four steel rollers shod with solid rubber, and it is pulled — by two cords of roughly a hundred and thirty metres each, with four handles worked into the rope at intervals so the tension can be held.

The shrine itself is silver over a wooden core: a domed pavilion on six Corinthian columns, with the twelve apostles standing around it. Vincenzo Archifel, a Catanese goldsmith, made it in 1518. A bomb destroyed it in 1943 and it was rebuilt to the same design three years later.

A silver and gilt shrine at night, its canopy roof crowded with small standing figures and its columns wound with white carnations, lit from within. Men in white cotton smocks and black skullcaps stand around it, one reaching up to the platform. At the right a bundle of long gilded poles with ornamented ends leans against the crowd, and people watch from a balcony above. — The shrine at night. The men in white are on the cords; the long gilded poles at the right are the candle-poles that travel with it.Effems · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The men on the cords wear the sacco, and it is a uniform rather than a costume: a white cotton smock, a black velvet cap called the scuzzitta, a white monastic cord at the waist, white gloves, and a white handkerchief held up and waved. They are on the rope from before dawn.

A wide city street with men in white cotton smocks standing in loose groups down the middle of it, some with a small emblem on the back. The roadway is covered in an even pale layer underfoot. A policeman stands in the left foreground, ambulance crew in high-visibility jackets wait at the right, and an arch of unlit light frames spans the street in the distance. — The pale layer on the road is sawdust, spread along the route against the wax that comes off the candles.Effems · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Towers that belong to trades

The candelore go ahead of the shrine: carved and gilded wooden towers, hung with flowers, carrying putti and small saints. Each weighs between four hundred and nine hundred kilos and takes between four and twelve men.

Each one belongs to somebody. There is the bishop's small cereo, which goes first and descends from an offering made in 1766; the Rinoti of San Giuseppe La Rena; the gardeners', crowned, and called the queen of them; the fishmongers'; and the bakers', which is the biggest and heaviest and needs all twelve. They process in order of the date each was built, the bishop's excepted.

A hundred and ten years between these two, and the towers are doing the same thing in both.Effems · CC0 · Wikimedia CommonsSalv. Sciuto · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

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 most of a tonne of timber through a packed street and, quite openly, showing off.

What the bust wears

Inside the shrine is a silver reliquary bust finished in 1376, and what it carries is two centuries of other people's jewellery. Brooches, crosses, rings and orders are pinned across the breastplate until almost none of the silver shows. They were given, one at a time, by people keeping a promise.

Close on a reliquary bust: a painted face under a tall jewelled crown, a pearl necklace, and a breastplate so densely covered in brooches, crosses, stars and coloured stones that little of the metal beneath is visible. A small inscribed plate sits on the shoulder. A man in a white smock and black skullcap leans in beside it, and white carnations bank up below. — Almost nothing on the breastplate came with it. Each piece was given by somebody, and pinned on.Effems · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The relics themselves have been away and come back. They were taken to Constantinople in 1040 and returned to Catania in 1126 — which is the reason for the second feast in August, at the foot of this page.

One street in ten

Two stretches of the route are the ones people come to watch. Via di Sangiuliano is a one-in-ten gradient on lava paving with wide joints between the stones, and the S-bend of the Salita dei Cappuccini is taken in three stages rather than one.

Both were once rushed at a run. They are not any more — they are taken fast, and not at a run, and the difference is the point. Watch them from the side of the street.

Looking up a street so full of people that no road surface is visible: hundreds in white smocks and black caps among others in dark coats, with a line of them continuing up a stepped stretch beyond. Arches of white filigree lights hang above, spectators fill every balcony, and at the right edge the silver shrine stands level with the upper floors, banked with white flowers. — The climb, with the shrine at the right. The white is the sacco; the black caps are the scuzzitte.Effems · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The claim the city repeats

The same goes for UNESCO, which comes up often and is wrong every time. No Sicilian festival is inscribed on any UNESCO list. The one Sicilian entry is the opera dei pupi, the puppet theatre, listed in 2008 — and the 2013 inscription for shoulder-borne processional machines covers Nola, Palmi, Sassari and Viterbo, and no town in Sicily at all.

Almonds, and the other feast

Two things are eaten in the days around the feast, and both are almond paste shaped into something else. The olivette are green marzipan olives. The cassatelle are small round iced cassate with a cherry on top, and the name Catania actually uses for them is blunter than anything a guidebook will print.

A shop display heaped with small bright green marzipan olives, dusted and slightly irregular, with a smaller heap of chocolate-coated ones behind them and clear cellophane bags at the front edge. — Olivette: almond paste, coloured green, sold by weight from the first days of February.Effems · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

And there is a second feast, which almost nothing in English mentions. On 17 August Catania marks the return of the relics from Constantinople with a short procession of reliquaries and fireworks. It is a fraction of the size of February and it is the better one to walk into by accident.