Easter is a very important moment for the people of Italy: for those still actively practicing, it is a time of meditation and prayer, steeped in profound spiritual meaning; for everybody else, it remains deeply tied to memories of traditions, practices and, of course, dishes, that bring us back centuries. Every Italian, I am sure, must have cherished memories of hours spent in the kitchen attentively observing grandmothers making torta pasqualina, tortellini, cestini pasquali with sweet bread dough and whole eggs. Most of us still feels the warmth of those first days of Springs, of that special Sunday scented of incense, repleting with the beautiful sounds of perfectly pitched voices coming our from the local church, music filling our young souls with an intangible, overwhelming sense of awe, the first stirs of those deep, heart moving emotions only the beauty of art allows to experience.
As a country of tradition, and of Catholic tradition in particular, Easter time, especially the week preceding Easter Sunday, is also a time when every town, village and parish in the country opens up the chest of history, takes out its best gilded attire and prepares to honor the Saviour and, indeed, tradition.
Good Friday is the most important day of the Holy Week, as it commemorates the death of Jesus Christ: it comes as no surprise to realize that traditional ceremonies and celebrations take place everywhere in the country: in my town, a long mass, with beautiful music and hundreds of participants, is usual. There are some places though, where celebrating Good Friday is taken a notch above everywhere else, like in Procida.
Procida, Procida: beautiful island of Campania, the blue of its sea melting into a sky of tranquility. Known and loved by the Greeks of Cumae, who at the time of Magna Graecia, made of it a new home for themselves. Then the Roman came and, in the Middle Ages, the Lombards and the Normans, even some incursion of the Moor. In modern times, the growth of the shipbuilding industry, which was to enter into endless decline by the beginning of the 20th century.
Procida, so beautiful and ethereal it became inspiration for poetry and prose: Lamartine and Morante set beautiful stories there. Even cinema chose it, in more recent years, as a splendidly delightful set: think of the The Postman and The Talented Mr. Ripley. But the reason we ideally want to visit Procida today is all historical and spiritual and, as it often happens when you decide to take one these little impromptu trips with me, it brings us back a few centuries, more precisely at the end of the 17th .
It is then that the Confraternita dei Turchini – a name that recalls beautifully the color of Procida’s sea, turquoise – made the first Good Friday Procession, or to say as we do, Processione del Venerdì Santo: in it, all male residents of the island would wear their typical confratello uniform, a white robe and a turquoise mantle, to carry on their sturdy shoulders the Misteri, traditional artistic representations of important events of the life of Christ. Just like tridimensional paintings, the Misteri draw you into their world, made of spiritual awe, of creativity and artistic inspiration.
The procession, which gets through the Procida historic centre from Terra Murata to the Porto della Marina Grande, probably took place for the first time, albeit not in this specific form, about a century before the Turchini made it a personal affair. Indeed, holy processions and Misteri were a thing then: Naples had its own, too, organized also by a confraternita.
What strikes the most about Procida’s Processione dei Misteri is how it kept faithful to those very first ones throughout the centuries. If you have the luck to participate, think about that: you’re witnessing something older than the United States, something to which generation after generation of men and women took part, the first directly, the latter with prayers. Something whose ancient, ancestral energy still lives in the eyes, hands, shoulders and hearts of those animating it today.
The Processione starts at dawn, on Good Friday: all Misteri are there, in the square of Terra Murata, just outside Saint Michael Archangel Abbey: think of the beauty of that silence, think of how our senses are alive and vividly ready to experiment, in those early hours of the day. That alone is something worth living. The voice of a trumpet and three drum beats break the stillness of the air: that’s how, in ancient Roman times, the passage of those sentenced to death was announced. For the whole length of the procession, this is what you’ll hear, a mournful reminder of death, a nod to history, a pained prayer, for those who believe. And the procession goes, through streets and alleys, drums and trumpet, whispering voices in prayer, stopping here and there – the very same places, for hundreds of years – for a moment of meditation, of silence, of contemplation.
The Misteri are the first in line in the procession, followed by traditional religious statues: that of Christ Dead, an 18th century piece by Carmine Lantriceni, that of Our Lady of Sorrows, more recent, crafted in the 19th century and the pallio, a traditional funeral canopy. Behind the Virgin Mary’s statue, the angioletti: children of about two years of age, carried in the arms of adults, wearing black and gold gowns, reminiscent of the Our Lady of Sorrow’s own dress.
And then, of course, there is music. The local brass band follows the statues and the Misteri, it plays marches and religious hymns, voices mingling, rising in the air of the morning. Then the priests and celebrants, local authorities and the people. Many, many people, faithful especially, but also tourists, curious, lovers of local heritage.
All certainly taken away by the beauty and pathos of the ceremony, some brought to think and reflect about the strength of our history and traditions, others about that of spirituality. A beautiful way, in any case, to live a meaningful day by the turquoise sea of Procida.
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