One of the festivals that most represents the Italian Easter tradition is the "Procession of the Mysteries" in Trapani, Sicily, where there is an intense popular participation. Imagine a river of people standing for twenty hours in extreme silence as they watch the representation of the "Mysteries".

This magical word is not to be considered as an incomprehensible ritual for the human intellect. In dialect, with a capital letter, it means trades, that is, artisan corporations. The "Mysteries" are not only a devotional fact but they represent the life that everyone entrusts to the sky and to nature, a feast in which man tells about himself and his community, with the aim of getting better, of having a new life.

The "Procession of the Mysteries" on Good Friday is a representation that is lost in the early days, a unique spectacle for faith and folklore. Every year, for the occasion, Trapani and the entire population agonize, die and rise again behind the "vare", a kind of small stage carried on the shoulders of devoted men, on which groups of statues, made of wood, canvas and glue, recount the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ. Between the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the "Societas Sanguinis Christi" created the first statuary groups that were entrusted to the consuls of the arts and crafts.

There are 20 "vare" of statues and an impressive feature is that during the parade the shoulder bearers begin to sway to the sound of solemn and sad music, as if that movement in people's immobility had a hypnotic function. The actors are the artisanal categories, the "classes" as they are still called.

Every year the faithful relive the pains of the cold Winter, human sufferings, a sort of atonement for their sins which always, as happens in nature, precedes a rebirth.

Every year, for centuries, there has been the same emotion and the same pain, the same ritual of flowers, colors, lights, with the only background of the harrowing notes of the funeral marches. The human is silent, there is no such thing as a collective catharsis that lasts exactly twenty hours: from the afternoon, to the night, until dawn. It starts from the beautiful baroque church of Purgatory with the "scinnuta", that is the descent of the groups for assembly, and the decoration that always takes place, by ancient tradition, amidst controversy and jealousy.

The twenty groups were completed in the year 1772 and since then each Trapanese has his own mystery of belonging and that of election.

The twenty hours of sacred representation are interrupted only by the ritual stop in Piazza Vittorio for the sacred liturgical function, followed by hot drinks and libations to refresh oneself after the long vigil and dispersion of energy and resistance to fatigue and also to the cold wind that right in the Easter period persistently blows from the sea.

At dawn, when fatigue is felt and the cold becomes humid and penetrates the bones, people go back, after the cycle of life and death was represented in all its drama.