by John Keahey
Also, I was curious about why Racalmuto’s festivities are kicked off with what appears to be a unique element: It begins the night before, on March 18, with a huge falò, or bonfire.
Traditionally, friends familiar with the event said, the fire consumed old furniture discarded by villagers. But a few villagers I asked about its origins merely shrugged. That’s the way it always has been; no one really knows.
The part about burning the furniture may have been true at one time, Racalmuto resident Concetta Barbieri told me one afternoon. But she surmised that the tradition likely began as a rite of honoring the arrival of spring and later evolved into part of the observance of the saint’s feast day.
Originally, she said, old wooden wine casks were burned to symbolize the change of seasons and the preparation for the upcoming growing season. Later, folks may have tossed old, broken-down furniture onto the growing pile in anticipation of the falò. The earliest practice, of course, could have its long-forgotten roots as a rite of paganism, which was then co-opted by Christians over the centuries as their religion grew.
During my March 2009 visit, the huge pile to be burned consisted mostly of pasteboard boxes and old lumber, although I did see one broken chair and a few battered dresser drawers in the heap, along with the shattered staves of a beat-up, lightweight barrel. There also were some splintered bed slats, stacks and stacks of wooden crates that once held fruit and vegetables, and piles of tree branches.
The mountain of discards today is a repository for anyone wishing to get rid of things flammable. For a few days before the event, I watched it grow dramatically as folks piled on their refuse.
The fire is scheduled to begin after dark, at 6:30 P.M. in the Piazza Barona. It follows vespers, or evening prayer, in the Church of San Giuseppe, where at least two hundred or more of the faithful are packed into the tiny sanctuary. I listen for a while and then trudge downhill to witness the spectacle. At 5:45 P.M., no one is there. I wander around the square, looking over the edge down toward the unique town fountain, where water spurts out of several pipes and is carried into a long, rectangular basin and then into a semicircular basin farther along. This fountain is next to a newly restored building that was once the village slaughterhouse. Animals drank from the rectangular pool; women washed clothes in the semicircular part. The former slaughterhouse now contains offices for people who help deal with immigrants, mostly from North Africa and points farther south on that nearby continent.
Soon, a large concessioner’s truck pulls into the square. Then, a few teenagers ride by on motorcycles, stop, and mill about. With fifteen minutes to go before the scheduled blaze, more people—families with children, groups of teenagers—begin straggling into the piazza.
Finally, about 6:45 P.M., with the crowd quickly building to about three hundred, an elderly man strides up to the wooden pile, shoves a bunch of butcher paper into key places, and starts lighting it. I am told that this gentleman has held the honor for many, many years of lighting the fire. A year after my visit, he had died, and a new fire starter was chosen.
The flames flicker, then grow in confidence and begin to spread. Within moments the jumbled heap, now perhaps twenty feet tall, is overwhelmed. Flames shoot as high as fifty feet, and the crowd inches away as the heat intensifies. It’s a spectacle that lasts for perhaps forty-five minutes. As the fire begins to die down, folks start to leave, ambling up the narrow, twisting streets toward Via Garibaldi. There, they hang out for a few moments before disappearing up more side streets. Within a few hours, everything is quiet; the fire is but a low, smoky glow; the square is deserted and dark.
The scene is like the opening of the Federico Fellini film Amarcord, his coming-of-age comedy about life in his hometown of Rimini, high on Italy’s Adriatic coast. The townspeople surround the great fire—it obviously is their version of the falò for San Giuseppe. They dance and chortle excitedly as the flames leap higher and higher. In Racalmuto, the large crowd is all smiles and full of applause, but there is no dancing.
* * *
The festa di San Giuseppe is the next day, the nineteenth of March. It starts in the morning with a procession billed as “la processione della sacra famiglia vivènte” (the procession of the living sacred family), and is for children. I arrive in front of the Church of San Giuseppe, its exterior rough, unadorned, built in the 1600s of brown stone from the nearby hills. The place is packed with families, and in an open area next to the church, a young boy leads a donkey draped in a beautiful, richly pattered blanket. In a strap around the donkey’s forehead is stuck a card showing a painting of Saint Joseph holding an infant Christ. Soon, two girls aged around eight and wearing robes are placed onto the donkey’s back. I guessed that they were Mary and her mother, Saint Anne.
I’m wrong about Saint Anne, Concetta Barbieri told me later. One little girl actually represents Jesus. A slightly older boy, dressed in rich blue with a red cross over his left breast, takes the donkey’s halter rope. He is Saint Joseph. As recently as three years before, Concetta says, these roles were given to poor villagers, and people invited to join the procession were “tramps” who loitered about the town. Now, the roles go to kids of devout church members.
“This is a real honor” for the kids, Concetta says, for these people are very fond of their chiesa, the Church of San Giuseppe. The youngsters are into nonstop smiling and obviously pleased at being the center of attention. Proud, smiling parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters are taking photographs and cheering the trio on.
It is amazing how a procession like this works in a small village with narrow, steep streets crammed with cars and a space wide enough only to allow room for vehicles—and folks walking a few abreast—passing through. Participants simply make do. A handful of men and women wearing smocks imprinted with TRAFFICO POLIZIA, and looking more like volunteers than regular traffic cops, move ahead to stop cars. Occasionally a vehicle slips through, and the procession stops while participants step aside to let it pass. Then, the group forms again and proceeds uphill, then downhill, then uphill again, the tiny donkey trudging along.
The circuit lasts for about forty-five minutes, ending once again at the Church of San Giuseppe after moving along Via Garibaldi, the village’s main street that is punctuated here and there with the clusters of older men typically found in Sicilian and Italian villages. They are dressed in comfortable slacks, well-buffed dress shoes, pressed dress shirts usually covered by light sweaters, and sport coats.
Some wear the traditional Sicilian cap, the coppola. They spend a significant portion of their days here, strolling along this portion of the street’s single block, talking with one another, enjoying the weather and sweet companionship of lifelong friends.
Since this day is an altar-bread festival throughout Sicily, Racalmuto has its offering as well, but on a smaller scale than the event at much larger Salemi. Next to the church, on the bed of a large truck, is a plainly adorned table covered with a white cloth. A bowl of fruit sits in the middle with three place settings. “La tavola di San Giuseppe!” a bystander whispers proudly in my ear.
Lined up against the truck railing behind the table are four, nearly six-foot-tall pieces of bread. The bread is in the shape of shepherds’ staffs, with crooks at the top. They appear to be in one piece, but I can’t imagine where an oven big enough would be found in this small town. Molded onto the surfaces are Christian symbols, such as crosses.
People are served pieces of this bread that, when the procession ends, is ceremoniously broken up and placed in baskets.
Youngsters are taught these traditions, and all seem eager to participate. The little actors are genuinely pleased to be selected for their roles, and the two girls, atop the little donkey, are the most charming of all.
* * *
This morning’s children’s procession and the falò the night before mark only the beginning of the festivities. At 6:30 P.M., following a brief service before a standing-room-only congregation packed into the
tiny church, the processione del simulacrum di San Giuseppe, or the “procession of the sacred statue” of the saint, begins.
Here, near the church’s front doors, the simulacrum stands erect on a platform with long handles protruding from each side of the base. The six-foot-tall saint is holding a small Jesus. The platform is made of well-polished wood. At San Giuseppe’s feet are several clusters of lights. As people pass by the statue—and this is difficult given the congestion in the room—each one reaches out to touch San Giuseppe’s foot and silently mouth a brief prayer, then make the sign of the cross. Men, women, teenagers, and young children all do this, seemingly spontaneously and with great reverence.
A group of men are struggling with the main front doors, which are badly in need of restoration. The squeaking fifteen-foot-tall doors eventually swing open, punctuated by grunts from the men (“Uno, due, tre, spinga!” Push!). The congregation moves out into the chilly night, a slight breeze swirling pieces of discarded paper around the tiny square. Perhaps 150 folks wearing heavy coats and with scarves wrapped snugly around their necks, are preparing to follow the saint in his procession around this small village.
Eight young men, chosen for the task because of their sturdy builds, assume positions at each of the four long handles protruding from the corners of the saint’s platform. They squat down, push up against the rails with their shoulders, and lift the heavy contraption. Think of the horror if the saint tumbled from his perch! An older man positions himself at the front between the rails and another at the rear. They place their hands on the ends of the poles to serve as guides, and keep the saint on course during his journey. The one in front has a wooden stick, intricately carved, that he uses to tap signals on the platform. One tap means “lift”; two quick taps mean “walk,” and the platform bearers, like soldiers in close-order drill, step off together, left foot first.
A group of older teenagers and perhaps a few twentysomethings, all dressed in dark navy blue uniforms with white and light blue cords intertwined about their right shoulders, fall in behind the saint’s platform. This is the Corpo-Musicale “G. Verdi,” or Racalmuto’s town band. (All the town bands I saw in Sicily seem to include “G. Verdi,” referring to opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, in their names.)
Band members gather in loose formation, not like a shoulder-to-shoulder, rank-and-file precision-marching band in the United States. They seem to have no leader, except for one much older gentleman who takes his place in the second-to-last row among the horn players.
With laughs, smiles, and gentle cajoling, he gets the musicians into some semblance of order: two rows of clarinetists in the front, drummers, and then brass players. On some hidden cue, the snare drummer beats out a brief signal and, without a conductor, the band begins, everyone playing at precisely the right instant.
The group plays wonderfully; no squeaky clarinet reeds, not one player out of tune. Clearly, with no plan or intent to be “in step,” the group ambles forward as the loud taps of the stick against the saint’s platform ring out. The saint, carried high and proud by the eight confident young men, begins his journey.
The two priests chant Hail Marys through a wireless microphone they hand back and forth to each other and, occasionally, to a member of the crowd, their voices spilling out from a loudspeaker concealed somewhere in the platform. A group of the faithful leads the procession in front of the priests; a worshipper, as proud about the honor as the three children the day before, is carrying the congregation’s flag.
The procession stops every fifty feet or so, to give the head priest a chance to deliver a brief sermon or homily to those watching along the sidelines or, more likely, to give the statue carriers a brief respite. It is a slow, exhausting journey down from the tiny square, through Piazza Barona, where the bonfire blazed the night before. From there, it heads up the steep Via Regina Elena and then turns up a shorter, steeper, narrower street and onto the main street through the village center, Via Garibaldi.
It takes two hours, and it represents for these devout Sicilian Catholics a solemn, serious tradition. The more than two hundred souls who follow this procession—from toddlers carried by parents, to young children and teenagers, to adults of all ages, including a large contingent of elderly—stay with it for the entire route, repeating the countless Hail Marys chanted by the priests.
Passersby watch respectfully, caps off, as the saint passes. A young woman sitting behind the wheel of her car waiting for an opening through the people, makes the sign of the cross as the saint passes by. An elderly woman in black who is bent with age and leaning on a cane and with a white-lace shawl around her shoulders watches from a narrow balcony above. She repeatedly makes the sign of the cross and mouths words only she can hear. It is indeed a remarkable spectacle, driven by passion and faith.
This show of respect and faith is much different from what I have witnessed in northern Italian churches or even churches in Rome, with the exception of the Vatican. I see few people attending services; congregations are populated by only a handful of mostly older women.
In Sicily, in the half dozen or so churches I entered during services, nearly every seat is taken, and young people appear to be as involved as adults. For example, processions in the city of Enna, as we will see later, draw children as young as five or six as participants. Catholicism remains very strong in Sicily—and throughout southern Italy—in a nation where fewer and fewer people attend church regularly. As in the United States, attendance is higher only during Easter.
A friend raised in this culture confirms that many Sicilians are believers and take the Catholic doctrine seriously. What they don’t like is the organization of the church, the hierarchy, and the Vatican telling them what to do and how to act.
Concetta Barbieri, who agreed one afternoon to show her village to me, says that out of the ten thousand residents of Racalmuto, perhaps four thousand are devout in their regular attendance at church services among the four active churches in the village. This is typical for most Sicilian villages, she says. Four priests and a deacon serve these congregations. They team up, moving among the different services.
Parishioners are extremely loyal to their local churches, and something is going on at each nearly every day. One afternoon, for example, while visiting a church at the top of steep steps—the seventeenth-century Church of the Santa Maria del Monte—I listen to a group of older women bundled in coats against the chill of the stucco interior. They stand in a tight circle, holding lighted tapers, chanting prayers.
* * *
But more than festivals has drawn me to Racalmuto. This was the birthplace of the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia—someone I wanted to learn more about. Second, it is the ancestral village of a close friend who speaks lovingly of it. And I have spent time speaking with a Sicilian-Canadian anthropologist whose forebears came from here. Hundreds of Racalmutese, like other Sicilians seeking better lives, found their way to Hamilton, Canada, the eastern United States, or South America early in the twentieth century.
Racalmuto’s development was influenced not by the Greeks, but by the Arabs who first created a town here, and later by the Normans and the French. It is a village like many others, with a rich ancient and medieval history and traditions that have remained a significant part of daily life.
Another appeal is that this is a village not overrun, or even much affected, by tourism. Its shops serve local people. There are no souvenir shops selling T-shirts or cheap imitations of Sicilian ceramics. I had a hard time even finding a postcard. It has only one or two places where visitors can stay but is rich in restaurants that fill up with locals, night after night, starting about nine o’clock. More than two decades before, while visiting Catania, I was hard-pressed to find a restaurant that was open before nine. The farther south you go in Italy, the later people eat. Most of the places in this village are still full of noisy, laughing diners around midnight.
Daily life is real here; everyone knows everyone else. When out of the presenc
e of strangers, they speak in local dialect that even a visiting Italian from the mainland would find hard to follow.
* * *
Leonardo Sciascia (1921–1989) ranks up there with a group that includes older Sicilian writers Giovanni Verga and Luigi Pirandello. He also was a contemporary with Italian writers Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri, and Roman writer Dacia Maraini, whose mother was Sicilian. The only living survivors of this group are Camilleri, primarily known for his Inspector Montalbano mysteries, and Maraini, a well-known feminist, playwright, novelist, and newspaper columnist.
Incidentally, Racalmuto is the birthplace of opera tenor Salvatore Puma, born in 1920, a year before Sciascia. Puma was a sought-after singer in many Italian opera houses, from La Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice to San Carlo in Naples to the Massimo in Palermo. He died in 2007 in Rome at age eighty-seven. He is revered in his hometown; all his costumes are on display, lovingly kept in immaculate condition in Racalmuto’s late nineteenth-century theater.
In each of my visits, different townspeople have gone out of their way to mention him to me; two personally guided me to the theater, eager to show me the costumes.
Sciascia is revered in Racalmuto as well. If the church allowed locals to choose their own saints, he likely would be one, despite his skepticism about the religion of his youth. The Fondazione Leonardo Sciascia is housed in a tastefully restored, three-story, late nineteenth-century structure that possesses a spectacular view of the village. Here are housed in sunny, renovated rooms all of his papers, manuscripts, first editions of his books printed in a variety of languages, and a major portion of his personal book collection. There is a large lecture hall for international conferences and well-spaced tables for researchers who come here to unlock the mysteries of this internationally respected writer.