Whatever the significance of the things they carried or the origin of their belief in them, the people in the carts kept flinging them to the boys in the road, who caught them and picked them up and carried them off to make their festa with them later on. They were all very lively, but no one seemed to me very drunk, not more drunk than the nudi were naked; there were drunken people among them, but not enough to make me feel sure that S. Alfio ought to be identified with Bacchus. One can see more drunkenness on Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday, but one does not hastily identify Saint Lubbock with Dionysus.
CATANIA
CHAPTER XXI
HOLY WEEK
PALM SUNDAY
Being in Catania for Holy Week I went to the cathedral on Palm Sunday. The archbishop in his yellow mitre, red inside because he is also a cardinal, accompanied by nine canons in white mitres and many priests and others, passed out of the church by a side exit and proceeded to the western entrance, which was closed against him. I heard him knock and listened to the chanted dialogue which he carried on with those inside. I saw the great doors thrown open and watched the procession enter and pass up the nave among crowds of people who waved palm-branches.
After this I called at the Teatro Sicilia, the marionette theatre of Gregorio Grasso, and discovered that he was devoting all the week to the Story of the Passion and would begin that evening with the event which I had seen commemorated by the procession in the cathedral. Here was an opportunity to see something which I had often wished to see and about which I had talked with Achille Greco and his sons in their theatre at Palermo, where they also do the Passion in Holy Week, using a play in verse written by Filippo Orioles of which they have a MS. copy; but they have not performed it recently because it takes too much preparation. Orioles wrote his play for living actors, and it is laid out to get all the events into one performance instead of being a series of seven performances extending over a whole week as in Catania.
Gregorio Grasso took me behind, where one of his assistants, Carmelo, showed me the preparations and told
me about the performance. The first scene was to be the meeting of the Sanhedrin and the beginning of the conspiracy of Annas and Caiaphas to destroy the Nazarene; this makes a firm foundation on which the rest of the drama is built. The second scene would be the departure of Christ with Mary; after that would come the Entry with Palms into Jerusalem, and the evening was to conclude with a cinematograph show.
As a rule in this theatre the back scene is only about a third of the way down the stage, the figures appear in front of it and are manipulated by men who stand on a platform behind, leaning over a strong bar which runs along the top of the scene, their heads, shoulders and arms being concealed by a piece of scenery which falls just low enough. The entry into Jerusalem had been prepared behind this back scene; it was a set group representing Christ on the ass, surrounded by apostles carrying palms, and was to be disclosed by the removal of the back scene, the bar and the platform in front of which the meeting of the Sanhedrin would be shown.
But I was not to witness the performance because Turiddu Balistrieri wanted me to go to the Teatro Giacinta Pezzana and see a special performance of La Signora dalle Camelie in which he and some of his family, who are all artists, were to take part. I could not go to both and chose Dumas because, in the first place, being Turiddu’s compare it was my duty to support the family. In the second place I had seen the Entry with Palms at the duomo in the morning and had all the rest of the week free to see the marionettes do the rest of the story. So I went to the Teatro Pezzana in the evening. It is a small place, small enough to have been formerly used for marionettes, and was now being used by a Society of Lovers of the Drama. Turiddu was presiding over the box-office and had considered my requirements. He sent me in with his young brother Gennaro, who found me a place, and I saw a play which cannot be considered seriously except as an