Easter in Italy - more than just chocolate!

If you're lucky enough to be in Italy for Easter, you probably won't see the Easter bunny or go on an Easter egg hunt but Easter in Italy is a huge holiday, second only to Christmas in its importance for Italians. While the days leading up to Easter in Italy include solemn processions and masses, Pasqua, as it's called in Italian, is a joyous celebration marked with rituals and traditions. Pasquetta, the Monday after Easter Sunday, is also a public holiday though-out Italy whilst strangely, Good Friday or Venerdì Santo, is not.

On Good Friday the Pope celebrates the Via Crucis or Stations of the Cross in Rome near the Colosseum. A huge cross with burning torches lights the sky as the stations of the cross are described in several languages. At the end, the Pope gives a blessing. Easter mass is held in every church in Italy, with the biggest and most popular celebrated by the Pope at Saint Peter’s.

Solemn religious processions are held in Italian cities and towns on the Friday or Saturday before Easter and sometimes on Easter Sunday. Many churches have special statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus that may be paraded through the city or displayed in the main square. Parade participants are often dressed in traditional ancient costumes, and olive branches are often used along with palm fronds in the processions and to decorate churches. Enna, in Sicily, has a large procession on Good Friday, with more than 2,000 friars dressed in ancient costumes walking through the streets of the city. Trapani, also in Sicily, is a good place to see processions, held several days during Holy Week. Their Good Friday procession, Misteri di Trapani, is 24 hours long. These processions are very elaborate and quite dramatic. What's believed to be the oldest Good Friday procession in Italy is in Chieti in the Abruzzo region. The procession, with Secchi's Miserere played by 100 violins, is very moving. Some towns, such as Montefalco and Gualdo Tadino in Umbria, hold live passion plays during the night of Good Friday. Others put on plays enacting the stations of the Cross, or Via Crucis. Beautiful torchlight processions are held in Umbria in hill towns such as Orvieto and Assisi.

In Florence, Easter is celebrated with the Scoppio del Carro (the explosion of the cart). A huge, decorated wagon is dragged through Florence by white oxen until it reaches the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence's historic centre. After mass, the Archbishop sends a dove-shaped rocket into the fireworks-filled cart, creating a spectacular display. A parade of performers in medieval costumes follows.

 Sulmona, in the Abruzzo region celebrates Easter Sunday with La Madonna Che Scappa in Piazza. 

The island of Sardinia is a part of Italy steeped in tradition and a good place to experience festivals and holidays. Because of its long association with Spain, some Easter traditions are strongly linked to the Spanish Semana Santa or holy week. Since Easter is the end of the Lenten season, which requires sacrifice and reserve, food plays a big part in the celebrations. Traditional Easter foods across Italy may include lamb or goat, artichokes and special Easter breads that vary from region to region. The Colomba (a dove shaped cake) is often given as a gift as are the more recognisable chocolate eggs that usually come with a surprise inside.


On Easter Monday, some cities hold dances, free concerts, or unusual games, often involving eggs. In the Umbrian hill town of Panicale and many other rural areas a game called  ‘Ruzzolone’ is played and involves rolling wheels of cheese, weighing about 4 kilos, around the village walls and along village roads. It’s a bit like a cross between a huge cheesy yoyo and an old fashioned stick and hoop and the object is to get your cheese around the course using the fewest number of strokes.

 

 

Whether you're just getting started with Italian or approaching fluency, here are 21 odd, amusing and mildly interesting facts about a language known for its beauty, romance and musicality.

1. There are 21 letters in the Italian alphabet. J, k, w, x and y don't exist in Italian, except for in loan words like 'jeans'. Some of the dialects do use these letters though, particularly 'j' and 'k', and for that reason they appear in some proper names of people and places.

2. Did we say 'dialects'? Strictly speaking, that's wrong, because the regional languages of Italy are just that - languages. Dialects are variants of a standard language, but in Italy these different languages developed from Latin independently, before eventually people decided it made sense to settle on one common tongue.

3. The language we now call Standard Italian derives from 13th century Tuscan, or Florentine, to be specific. This choice was made after a few centuries of disputes between linguists, and was down to a number of factors. Florence's economic and cultural prestige played a part, particularly the works of the three great writers of the day (Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio), and perhaps most crucially, one particularly keen linguist, Pietro Bembo, who created the first ever grammatical manual of the Florentine language. Having the rules written down meant it was easier to adopt Florentine as the national tongue, rather than relying on a variety which was mostly spoken.

4. When it comes to the other regional dialects, the most widely spoken is Neapolitan, with over five million speakers.

5. And the least widely spoken is Croato. This is a dialect used by an ethnic minority from a region corresponding to present-day Croatia and spoken in Molise, which has only around 1,000 speakers. Hey, that's not bad coming for a region lots of people claim doesn’t exist.

6. Italy is an official national language in Italy, Switzerland, Vatican City, San Marino, and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta - not to be confused with Malta the country, where it enjoyed official status for centuries until 1934 but no longer does. It's also an official language of the European Union.

7. And it is recognized as a minority language in three other countries: Slovenia, Croatia and Brazil.

8. Slightly more than one million people speak Italian in the United States, although the number of Americans with Italian roots is far higher, at around 17 million.

9. There's debate as to what the first document written in Italian is, because it's hard to tell where Vulgar Latin ended and Latin began. The two main contenders are the Veronese Riddle - a scribble by a monk on a piece of parchment, likening ox ploughing fields to a pen on a page - and the Placiti Cassinesi - some legal documents about a property dispute. Thrilling stuff. Most linguists agree that the latter is the first true example of Italian, since the Veronese Riddle has too many features which are ambiguous or obviously Latin.

10. As for the first novel written in Italian, that's Alessandro Manzoni's I Promesso Sposi (The Betrothed). Anyone who's been through the Italian school system will have read it, and it's a good read, giving a great insight into Italy under Spanish rule and told through the lives of a peasant couple (available in English translation too). Manzoni agonized over writing it, spending four years on revisions and 'purification' of the language - which he achieved by spending time in Florence.

11. The purity of the Italian language is fiercely protected by the Accademia della Crusca, a society of linguists based in Florence.

12. When Italy was unified in 1861, only 2.5 percent of the population could speak the language - they all spoke their regional variants. Now, that figure is in the high 90s - though around five percent speak only or predominantly in their regional language.

13. Italian has some very close relatives. Its vocabulary is 89 percent shared with French, 88 percent with Catalan, 85 percent with Sardinian, 82 percent with Spanish and Portuguese, and 77 percent with Romanian.

14. Italian is the fourth most studied language in the world - an impressive feat, considering Italy's relatively small size.

15. Want to show off? The longest word in the Italian language is generally said to be 'precipitevolissimevolmente' meaning 'very quickly', but at 26 letters, it is surpassed by some medical terms such as 29-letter 'esofagodermatodigiunoplastica' which refers to a kind of plastic surgery. And we think this is cheating, but there are also numbers such as the mammoth 64-letter-long 'quattrocentocinquantaquattromilacinquecentoquarantaquattresimo' - that's the written form of '454,544th'.

16. Two words have eight consecutive vowles in them: ghiaiaiuolo and cuoiaiuolo. They refer, respectively, to someone who sells or produces gravel, and someone who sells or produces leather goods.

17. A few words contain four consecutive consonants, including 'substrato' (substrate), 'sanscrito' (Sanskrit), inscritto (inscribed) and 'instradare' (to direct).

18. Italian loves double consonants, but you'll rarely find an instance of double ‘q’. One of the few words it features in is 'soqquadro', which can be translated as 'disarray' or 'shambles'.

19. When we say Italian loves double consonants, we mean it really, really loves them. Some words have as many as four pairs of consonants, including some conjugated forms of 'appallottolare' (to ball up) and 'disseppellire' (to dig up).

20. 'But what is the highest number of occurrences of a single letter in a single Italian word?' we hear you cry. The answer is eight: both 'indivisibilissimi' and 'indistinguibilissimi' (the plural forms of 'very indivisible' and 'very indistinguishable' boast eight letter 'i's.

21. Finally, one for the poets: No word in Italian rhymes with 'fegato' (liver) even though plenty end in 'egato', because the stress falls on the first syllable. The same goes for 'despota' (despot), so if you were planning on writing a poem about a tyrant with liver problems, save yourself the bother.