Easter!

Sorry I've been a little short on updates lately. We're at the end of our semester so everyone is finally in studio, drawing our little lines and painting pretty little pictures. Also, I realize that I didn't really wrap up the Cinque Terre blog, but the gist of the last day was that we walked around some more and basically traveled on a train all day back to Castiglion F.no (and Orvieto for the other girls).

And now, on to Easter festivities! As you can imagine, Easter is pretty huge here in Italy. During this time, we got to see probably the coolest ritual that our town celebrates every year. We had heard about the several day long processions and how the outfits that they wear are from really ancient rituals... oh yea and they look exactly like the KKK. Someone from the town in charge of the rituals came to explain them to us while one of our administrators translated. He explained that the robes come in white, black, and dark blue for three different brotherhoods. After explaining for a long time in Italian what the robes look like, Paolo (our translator) just laughed and said "They look like the KKK". I've been wondering if Italians knew what those robes look like to us and now I know that they do. Maybe that's why only three towns in Italy still do this ritual.

The first procession was on Wednesday. It started at about 9:30- 9:45 in a loggia towards the top of the hill and they walk through a few streets finally passing by our study center and ending at the church. (I recently just found out that the church next to our study center is Castiglion Fiorentino's Duomo. It's a cute little church, but definitely not up to Duomo standards). Most of Santa Chiara emptied out into the piazza right in front of the church and waited till the procession came our way. We could hear them coming before we could see them because they had loudspeakers with Italian chants playing on a loop. They kind of sounded like creepy incantations and I had no idea what they said, except for the occasional "Holy Mary or Holy Father". That's about all I can pick out. Almost everyone in the procession has a lit candle and they walk in a line on either edge of the street while a few important figures come down the middle of the street. For every procession there's a new statue of Jesus and the one on Wednesday shows him post-flogging with the crown of thorns. After the large group of hooded townspeople (little kids are robed in the procession too!) come through the street, they are followed by a band and then regularly dressed townspeople. They filed all the way to the church and then turned around to go back the way they came.

Friday's procession was the same except the statue of Jesus depicted him post mortom. We watched from our windows this time, partially to get pictures from an aerial view but mainly because it was cold and we were already in pjs. Saturday night at midnight was the big procession plus Easter mass. This was also the first time that the Santa Chiara chapel was open to the public. The chapel has been used for storage and is in really bad condition so it has been closed for a long time while the study center is trying to gather funds to restore it. Unfortunately, that's the story of a few churches in our little town. We heard that there was going to be fireworks and doves were going to be released once the statue of resurrected Jesus was rushed into the church. I am always down for some fireworks! The procession was much smaller than on previous nights, and the robed individuals no longer had their hoods on. Big improvement I'd say. They rushed Jesus into the church and then.... not fireworks really. More like small bombs going off on the patch of grass by the study center. You could definitely tell who the Americans were because we all yelped when they started going off, it was kind of scary actually. I also didn't see any doves being released, but the little bombs did tick off all the bats so they were flying around like crazy. Close enough to doves I guess. We also noticed that Easter here must be like New Years at home; after the fireworks/ ball drop everyone starts kissing everyone and yelling Buon Pasqua! The mass was really short so we got back in plenty of time to work on studio.

Things I've Learned:

So you thought Americans dressed like crap for church right? You haven't been to Easter Sunday mass in Italy. The nicely dressed people are in jeans; I may have seen a suit or two. No colorful spring dresses or ties here!...except for the Americans of course.

The day after the procession there are "pericolo" (danger) signs all over the streets because the cars skid on the wax left from the candles. As if driving through narrow medieval streets wasn't hard enough!