Settimana Santa a Barrafranca

In outlining the historical path of a people cannot ignore the development and the root of the tradition in all its forms of expression. It is without doubt the main source where we can rediscover the nature and characteristics of the most hidden community where tradition is a part. The tradition is alive and perennial source of us and you cannot do without it in order to investigate the origins, characteristics and evolution of a people. It certainly represents the collective eg, as claimed by many scholars highlighted in this work, but together it is the collective ego to Ex choral event and perennial flourishing of their cultural roots. What remains of the past is incomparable treasure, which provides us with the means to better understand our present and to be credible witnesses throughout our history. The traditions are the most intimate history of humanity. In them is hidden the ego and the collective passion of the ego present.

The author of this book, with passion and enthusiasm, it is proposed just that through a careful and meticulous research: to better understand our traditions to find and consolidate our true cultural identity. Knowing our roots means to know ourselves means to meet and be reflected in the past to grow and to be protagonists in the present moment where the story becomes and it’s done.

The author of this interesting essay has dug into our past and, without presumption and rigorous method, analyzed written sources and oral testimonies in order to draw logical conclusions and appropriate. His was not a simple list of gestures, reports chronicles, but he sunk his gaze, with acumen appropriate, in the most ancient historical events, trying to bring to light the true historian on which our civilization was born. It is in the tradition, in fact, that you can recognize the fusion of different cultures, which can be found in the gestures, customs, songs, language, and way of being. It is absolutely natural thing in Sicily, at the center of the Mediterranean, crossing different cultures and syncretism that it would produce a new, our individuality territorial: Sicilian. Every nation that has invaded our these places brought us his gifts and helped to enrich our beloved island, rich in scents and sun, but has also brought pain and damage, deleting the original and ancestral identity and changing the traits anthropology of our origin. It is in the nature of things, however, open to the influences of neighboring civilizations and that is what has happened in our island: we did treasure and we melted into a new culture all that has come to us from other civilizations we have had the fortune or misfortune to welcome and host you for a long time. In fact, if we dig deep in our nature we will find etched in signs of other civilizations (Arab, Norman, Aragonese, Spanish …): we are the synthesis of different races and different mentalities. But how many historical, artistic production, how much we have lost with the passing of time and with the crumble and deteriorate the archaeological remains and literary! We lost stories, buildings, language, art. So much we have lost and never will recover. We buried in the bowels of oblivion historical numerous testimonies of our being.

It is in this messy heap of stories and testimonies that our enterprising author has moved his research, examining and analyzing various arguments to be able to answer many questions that are crowd in our minds. It is not easy to put together a credible and rational interpretation of events that have no clear origin and poorly documented, but she has tried and in many cases it has succeeded.

He understood that in religious rites popular lurk ancestral traditions rooted in the social fabric and are also found the character and identity of a people. He understood that the cultural background of our area is complex due to the domination that have taken place over the centuries and that the individual will cancel becoming one with his neighbor in integrating all the manifestations of living together.

The author’s research was limited specifically to the traditions associated with Easter in our area, but we also understand that in every aspect of tradition is the original core of the character of the people. Holy Week is just one aspect of the tradition in a global sense: in it are contained the seeds of everything. He highlighted the author, by analyzing the essential core of the tradition, just as in the ritual events that characterize the expressions choirs of Holy Week every participant is not only the viewer, but it is also an actor, first in sore Friday and then cheering on the Sunday Resurrection. She explored with intelligence and competence, the pagan tradition and has emphasized the Christianization of pagan rituals that took place over time in our environment, as was the case indeed in the whole area of the Roman Empire. So you understand the value of certain apotropaic rites, inherent in the nature of the human being and the use of symbolic language. Many things, in fact, are part of our tradition to rites and pagan customs, but neither can we deny that the religious sense, specifically being a Christian, it is clear and in many cases cancel the pagan heritage, relegating him to corollaries absolutely secondary. The pagan sense disappears or fades beyond belief when you consider that the religious festivals come from the religious meaning inherent in the consciousness of the human being. What differentiates them is the way to express itself and to manifest. Full of details are revealed references to pagan myths and their influence in the social and religious fabric of our society. Just remember the holidays Adonie and those related to Persephone, the Hilaria Attis and Celtic myths and those of the goddess Eostre. The dwell on them expands the boundaries of our knowledge and adds value to the research, considering it “a space open to all intelligences who spend their energies nell’avvalorare their insights.” Only in this way the assumptions supported by scholarly citations do not cover and do not delimit the spirit of research.

The holidays are the place of childhood, poetry, and it is in them that are to be found and brought out all the nuances of feeling and poetic activity.

The author has done its utmost to discover the value of votive and prummisioni (promises, vows) also finding their origin in pagan culture. He questioned the need to test and characterize the sacred space outside the walls of the church, finding its explanation in the explosion in the popularity of gestures and speech, unattached and free from the formulas of the liturgy. Worthy of attention in the text are detailed references to the liturgy of Holy Week. They should be judged for what they want to be and that is an essential and integral that determine and substantiate the tradition. They are not only a kind of liturgical manual. Liturgy and symbolism, faith and folklore are expressions that reflect and complement each other. We ask ourselves, is the liturgy that contributes to the formation of folk traditions or vice versa? The answer is left for further study.

Resorting to authoritative sources, and by placing special attention, the author dwells also on the way that the symbol is assumed that in the liturgical action of the folk festivals linked to the Holy Week. The symbol, he says, supersedes what it represents, making thus present what is absent.

Read the parts of the text which describes the traditions of several days, it is really exciting, especially for those who relives these events each year. They are new so the various processions and the various rituals that enrich the unfolding of the events of those days. The origins of the Passover, then viewed in the light of these events, there are more scholarly exposition, but vital moments of our spirit in which the light triumphs over darkness and in which the children of light have the upper hand over the children of darkness. It makes its own, then, the sense of pagan naturalism and the succession of the seasons, the eternal cycle of birth and death. Buy value, therefore, the dramatization of the pain on Good Friday and the joy of joy that is released after the siege of darkness, the Day of Resurrection. Everything makes sense, even the Sun-God of Good Friday, that Christ lit and covered with gold, so different from that of the canonical tradition, which is the metaphor and the renewed representation of the history of salvation.

Then it becomes vibrant and exciting to relive, together with the whole community, a sense of time and acquires significance and meaning pain that manifests itself in the crowd under the Baiarde and the triumph of Easter Day.

With great patience, the author has woven the content of the text, enriching it with many details, distributed and cited in the highlights. Its not only barren philology or overabundance of speech, but on the contrary is thoughtful interpretation of the evidence that the tradition offers us.

The work is aimed at a diverse audience ranging from the intellectual to the most acute populate most naive. Everyone finds what it has long sought.

These pages are fluid and exciting ones of this work that can involve and excite all those who are preparing to approach the values ??and meanings that Holy Week Barry, and not only encompasses.

Rich and is documented in the appendix where features include folk songs, for the most part in dialect with which you are better able to express the feelings stored in the depths of the soul.

I had some doubts, at first, to accept the task of drawing up the presentation of this work. They are, in fact, one of the authors, together with Gaetano Vicari’s essay entitled The great legacy that is the same theme. I thought it would be more suitable for another person less involved and alien to the subject treated and not directly called into question. But on reflection I realized that then, in the end, I could burden myself with this commitment, considering the fact that the work of Bevilacqua is a valuable addition to our. For a long time we thought we integrate and update it based on innovation and on the basis of a more accurate search, but the lady who preceded us.

I applaud the initiative of the author to publish this work is worthy to embed itself in the mosaic of works dealing with the history of our country.

17 cm. X 24 cm., 216 pages, illustrated.

Available product forms