Sicily

Silver, green caps, and a walk off the island

Syracuse keeps the feast of the woman killed here in 304, on the same date every December. She goes out of the cathedral on Ortigia in the afternoon, crosses to the mainland, and reaches the church built over her grave after dark.

Where: Syracuse — out of Ortigia, across to the mainland
When: 13 December, and back on the octave eight days later
Getting in: Free, in the street

The thirteenth of December

The date does not move: 13 December, every year. The silver figure leaves the cathedral in Ortigia in the middle of the afternoon and is walked out of the old town, across the bridge, and through the modern city to the basilica raised over the catacombs where she was buried — three and a half kilometres or so, and most of the daylight there is.

She stays a week. On the octave, eight days later, she walks back the same way. That is the whole structure of it, and it is the reason the December feast feels less like a procession than like a journey with a return leg.

Dusk over water and a low coastline. A gilded and silver figure of a crowned woman stands on a heavily worked silver bier, flanked by tall thick candles wound with dark red and white flowers and sprays of foliage. Below and around, a dense crowd of people in dark coats, most of them wearing soft green caps. — Out of Ortigia in the late afternoon. Almost every head below her is in a green cap.Samydm88 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Nobody has counted the crowd, and the one figure in circulation comes from a year when her body was brought back from Venice, which is not a normal December. What can be said is that this is the largest thing in the Syracusan year and the city stops for it.

A stone that already knew

Lucy was killed at Syracuse in 304, under Diocletian. That is the one point every account agrees on, and almost everything else told about her — the eyes on a plate above all — appears a thousand years later.

The oldest trace of the cult is a piece of carved stone. In 1894 Paolo Orsi found a Greek epitaph in the catacombs of San Giovanni, made for a woman called Euskia, and it records that she died on Lucy's feast day. It is dated to the late fourth or early fifth century. Somebody was already keeping the date within a century or so of the death — and they were keeping it here.

Five locks, five keys

For most of the year the figure stands in a niche in her chapel in the cathedral, and that niche has five locks. Five members of the Deputazione hold one key each, custody rotates every year, and no one of them can open it alone. They open it together, in front of the archbishop or his delegate, a few days before the feast.

What comes out is silver: a figure a little over a metre and a half tall, made by the Palermo silversmith Pietro Rizzo, commissioned in 1588 and finished in 1599. She stands on a silver casket of about 1611 carried on four crowned eagles, the arms of the city. Together they stand nearer four metres, which is why two different heights circulate and both are right.

A church interior seen from below. On the left hangs a very large dark canvas of a burial scene, two muscular gravediggers in the foreground and a crowd of mourners behind. To the right of it a silver figure of a woman stands on top of an ornate silver chest worked in relief, with tall white altar candles behind and banks of red and white poinsettias below. — The silver figure standing in front of Caravaggio's Burial of Saint Lucy, painted in Syracuse in 1608.Carmelovunque · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

She holds a plate with two eyes on it. That image is three centuries younger than the earliest accounts of her, which do not mention eyes at all — which makes it a fact about the statue rather than a fact about the woman, and a better one.

Forty-eight in green caps

Forty-eight men carry her, twenty-four to each of two wooden beams, in green velvet caps. In Syracuse they are simply i berretti verdi, the green caps. An older bearer walks with a handbell and sets the pace; the title is campanellaio.

The right to be under the beams used to belong to the carpenters' guild, recorded in a Senate act of 1789 and still spoken of a century and a quarter later. It is now a register and a draw. When she first comes out of the doors the shout that goes up is Sarausana jè — she is Syracusan — which is both a statement of fact and an argument, because her body is not here.

Night, and raining. The lit silver figure is carried along a stone balustraded bridge among a crowd holding black umbrellas, with tall flower-wound candle-poles around her and star-shaped decorative lamps on the street lights. A pale building front stands behind and the arch of the bridge is visible below. — Crossing to the mainland. December in Syracuse is not reliably dry, and the walk goes ahead anyway.Davide Mauro · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

It was taken to Constantinople in 1039 and to Venice in 1204, and it has come back only a handful of times. In 1988 the Patriarch of Venice gave the city a bone from her left arm. Three fragments of a rib are sealed in a small gold reliquary inside the silver figure's chest, so something of her does make the walk.

No bread that day

On the 13th Syracuse eats cuccìa: whole wheat berries boiled soft, served with sheep's ricotta, or with sweetened cream, or with chocolate. By tradition no bread and no pasta are eaten that day, and rice stands in for them.

The other feast, in May

Almost nothing in English mentions that Syracuse takes her out twice. The May feast is the Patrocinio, known as Santa Lucia delle Quaglie, and it is asymmetric: she moves a short distance across the cathedral square on the first Sunday, and makes the long circuit of Ortigia on the second.

Daylight. The silver figure, crowned and holding a lamp and a palm, stands on an elaborately worked silver bier banked with red and white carnations, in front of enormous plain fluted stone columns and a carved baroque wall. Bearers in green caps and a carabiniere in a plumed bicorn hat stand below. — The May feast, against the ancient columns the cathedral was built around.Salvo Cannizzaro · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

It rests on a real shortage. 1645 and 1646 were sterile years across Sicily. A canon of the cathedral recorded that during an octave of prayer a bird flew into the building and settled on the bishop's throne just as word came of a ship in the port carrying grain and pulses. The city took a perpetual vow of thanksgiving and kept the first one in May 1647.

The quails the feast is named for were once released live from the bier. They are not any more, which is the better outcome and worth knowing before you look for them.