Holy Week

Rites, processions and religious services that combine faith, traditions and also folklore characterise the week before Easter.

Short processions of palms in the churches, on the Sunday before Easter, start the rites of Holy Week.

On Tuesday takes place the procession of the painting of the Sorrowful Virgin called Madonna dei Massari, which on Wednesday afternoon meets that of the Madonna del Popolo.

On Thursday the “sepulchres” are set up in the churches, richly decorated altars that evoke the Last Supper. But the culmination is the evocative and moving procession of the Misteri, made up of eighteen statue groups, in wood, cloth and glue of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, recalling episodes of the passion of Christ, followed by Jesus in the urn and by the statue of the Sorrowful Virgin. Entrusted to the “maestranze” (craft guilds) and carried on shoulders, they parade from 2.00 pm on Friday to Saturday morning.