Tag: easter in italy

Easter recipes: holy good food

Food Easter traditions vary greatly from place to place, and here are some of my favorite Italian Easter recipes.
Pani Pasquali (Easter Breads) are spread in all the Peninsula! These breads celebrate Eastzer time and contain cheese, sausage or salami, breads hard-boiled eggs like Casatiello.

The soups are also largely loved during Easter time. For example, the Schiacciata alla Fiorentina, meaning the most traditional recipes for this classic Florentine Easter cake made with lard. First, you make a basic loaf with the yeast, then the magic!
Brodetto Pasquale is a rich Roman soup. The stars in this dish are lamb and beef, and the stew is thickened with eggs. Strong and really nutrient, this comfort food for peasants is today a really refined recipe and really common in Rome.
Torta alla Pasqualina is a fab pie from Liguria made with spinach and many eggs, which were once a reminder of spring coming finally. Old traditional recipes advice to make the puff pastry with 33 layers. Another sign of Spring are fresh peas and no Easter table is ready without them. The preparation is quite simple, and quite old too if we can traced it back to the 1450s, when Maestro Martino gave the same recipe our mothers follow today.

Turning to meat, you should try if you are in Italy in holiday during Easter time  Capretto Cacio e Uova: it is made with kid (or lamb) stewed with cheese, eggs, and peas and it comes from Neapolitan Easter tradition!
La Pastiera Napoletana is another amongst the finest dishes of
Neapolitan tradition!!! A centuries-old cake  appears in countless versions.
Everybody just love it from generation to generation. Going more south, we will find the Black Easter Rice: Riso Nero di Pasqua, a Sicilian Easter recipe made of…chocolate, instead of squid ink. So it is not really a first course but a pudding dessert. You can find it in the province of Messina as a devotion offer to the Madonna Nera di Tindari.

In Italy Easter is traditional

No Easter bunny? Then you’re in Italy for Easter holidays, my dear.

The Italian Easter celebrations  (“Pasqua” in Italian), has a lot of rituals and traditions to understand and enjoy. The Monday following Easter (la Pasquetta) is also a holiday in Italy. Over the weeks before Easter, in Italy  you can assist to a lot of processions and masses.
Good Friday and Easter Week Processions are held in many towns on the Friday or Saturday before Easter.

Many churches have special statues of the Virgin and Jesus put out only on these occasions, meaning in the Easter processions. Parade participants are often dressed up in traditional ancient costumes. Lots of Via Crucis are displayed all over Italy! Olive branches are often used instead of or along with palm fronds.

The oldest Good Friday procession in Italy? Probably it is the one held in Chieti,  Abruzzo region. The procession with Miserere played by 100 violins is very touching. If you are in Abruzzo, then go to Sulmona and celebrates Easter together with La Madonna Che Scappa in Piazza (The escaping Virgin). On Easter Sunday you will dress in green and white, because they are the colors of peace, hope, and resurrection, and you will meet with so many people coming from all the region in the main piazza. A woman will play the Virgen Mary and she will be dressed in black. She moves to the fountain and doves are released and the woman will change the dress wearing the colour green.

Enna, in Sicily, promotes a large procession on Good Friday; more than 2,000 friars dressed in ancient costumes! And Trapani has a Good Friday procession that lasts 24 hours!
The biggest and most popular Easter mass? If you are in Rome you can’t miss the Pope helding it at St. Peter’s Basilica. On Good Friday, the Pope celebrates the Via Crucis near the Colosseum.

In Florence, on Easter it has been displayed for centuries the Scoppio del Carro (literally, the explosion of the cart).

A huge, decorated cart goes through Florence, dragges by white oxen until it reaches Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence’s historic center. The Archbishop then will send a dove-shaped rocket into the cart, starting the fireworks held inside. A parade in medieval costumes follows the symbolic explosion into the Spring.