Catania celebrates Agata

In February 2008 I've passed two consecutive days participating, on the streets of Catania and together with its inhabitants, to the yearly celebration in honor of the patron saint. Celebration which happens to be one of the largest religious festivity in Italy.

Catania is the city where I was born, where I live and work: in Sicily both the sweet climate and the temperament of its people actually favor large social gatherings in public places. In spite of that, as in the rest of the island, the religious celebration is the only moment of the year, where all individuals act as a whole collectivity, sharing a single aim.

The emphatic and uncoordinated trends which move and push hundreds of thousands people over the streets of Catania, or other sicilian cities where similar, smaller, events also happen, conceal the human isolation which is the living condition of the human beings playing here their roles. It is the moment where the ancestral diffidence for the others is defeated, diverted by the common representation of the exterior religiosity.

Catania devotees wear a white tunic over their ordinary dresses, put a black velvet beret covering the head and a white linen handkerchief at the rope they use as a belt. They constitute a closed congregation with the privilege of controlling all the timings of the two different processions taking place each year the 4th and 5th of February.
Only a few are chosen to take the urn with the ashes of the Catania patron saint, Agata, and her reliquary bust from the crypt where they rest a full year. Others lay out two thick cords one hundred meters long, paired in front of the cart containing the relics of the saint.

Great wooden machines, shaped as baroque candle holders, covered with golden stuccoes, catholic simulacra and small lamps, each belonging to the medioeval merchant guilds or to a city quarter, are displaced in quick rushes by crews made of six to eight men: taking their weights on shoulders, through large leather belts and shoulder paddings made from jute sacks, they fiercely come ahead of the procession.

These celebrations are truly a way to observe with some distance the passions and feelings of the people: photographing the individuals who animate the event wants to constitute a way to both inform and entertain the viewer.

© Luigi Caponetto