The great festival of the Most Holy Crucifix (il Santissimo Crocifisso) has its roots in two distinct but related historic events. One of these followed the release of an edict by the Bourbon Viceroy of Sicily in 1782 that all citizens must give up their arms. Or, it may have happened in 1728, or it may never have actually happened at all; but town lore holds that the maestranza guild of Calatafimi-its craftspeople and small merchants-were both distrustful of their rulers and desirous of keeping their guns for hunting, and came up with the brilliant plan of having the local arch priest declare them the protective militia of the town's churches, thereby exempting them from the edict. To this day, the members of the maestranza proudly march in a hybrid civilian-military mode of black dress suits and fedoras, white vests and gloves, with shotguns at their side, in two tight columns with halberd-bearers at their lead. (In a highly unusual tradition, they proudly carry their weapons right into the church.) The other, earlier event also involved the maestranza. In 1657, several of the town's elite attributed miraculous cures to an ebony-figured crucifix that legend says had been found in a farm field. To express their due gratitude to God, they offered to share some of their wealth with the miserably poor and hungry populace. A procession was arranged, during which hard bread, dried nuts and chickpeas were thrown from horse-drawn carts to the on-looking crowds. The maestranza served as peacekeepers and protectors of the elite during the procession. Periodic re-enactments of this procession, joined with the later triumph over the Hapsburg edict, developed into the current festival, which merges civic pride with religious devotion.

In this festival that celebrates the supposed generosity of the town’s elite, it is not completely clear whether the re-enacted gratitude of the populace is expressed seriously or ironically. The modern citizens of Calatafimi recognize that the bounty distributed by the wealthy in the original festival was meager—a great deal of show and little substance. When they today imitate the eagerness of their poor ancestors in calling for bread, nuts and chickpeas to be thrown to them by the riders of the parade floats and scramble to collect that which falls on the ground, it seems that the act is tongue-in-cheek. (It parallels the shouts of the crowds at the New Orleans Mardi Gras for yet more cheap plastic beads to be thrown to them from the parade floats—in a practice that may, in fact, derive from festivals like Calatafimi’s, which would have been familiar to the many Sicilians who emigrated to New Orleans in the late 1800s.) On the other hand, the reverence for the crucifix itself, and for its companion miraculous icon, the marble relief Madonna di Giubbino, seems completely genuine. The third and last day of the festival dispenses with the bread-throwing carts and concentrates on solemn processions bringing offerings up to the church that houses the Santissimo Crocifisso and a town-wide procession of the two icons at dusk.

The modern festival of the Santissimo Crocifisso has many aspects beyond the re-enactment of the historic procession. It is an event that brings the entire town together in a massive cooperative enterprise. It also brings back—if only for a visit—many of the town’s far-flung emigrants, from Rome, Milan and Turin; from France, Germany and Britain, and even some from the U.S., Canada, Argentina and Australia. The 17th-century social structure and culture of the town are re-enacted as well, with traditional dress, music and dance, and with the key organizational role of the ceti—the various guilds of medieval origin, such as the maestranza, as well as the animal keepers, the farmers and orchard workers, the horsemen, the millers, the butchers and others. Highly decorated floats, pulled by every available tractor in the town and animated by children, demonstrate antique agrarian practices for harvesting and milling grains, pressing olives and grapes, picking fruit, and carry large explanatory signs in the old Sicilian dialect that is rapidly disappearing. Domestic animals, largely invisible in modern daily life, return to play a central role—from the sheep and goats on the herdsmen’s float to the many horses and mules ridden or pulling traditional Sicilian carts, to the huge pairs of oxen pulling the largest floats in the procession from which the traditional hard bread rings (cucciddati) are tossed to the crowds.

One of the festival’s most delightful qualities is its entirely noncommercial nature. It is based on an act of public generosity, and this generosity is preserved as the spectacle is made available freely to all, and tons of carefully hand-made cucciddati bread and small sacks of nuts, chickpeas, and candy are liberally tossed to the on-looking crowds that can top more than one-hundred-thousand—an amazing sight in the narrow streets of this town that many admit now has fewer than five-thousand full-time residents (although the official population is put around twice that number). Even the necessary remote parking and shuttle buses are free. The only profits made are by a few food sellers and itinerant vendors. But, in Sicilian culture, generosity can be closely related to one-upmanship, and there is an undeniable aspect of competitiveness and superiority that accompanies the festival. Nevertheless, holding the festival is a major stretch for the town, with its diminished population and struggling economy. Hundreds of thousands of Euros must be raised and thousands of hours of unpaid work dedicated to the preparations—ranging from procuring and training giant oxen of a type no longer found in Sicily to painting floats, from rehearsing music and dance to packing the little sacks of confetti—and to the myriad activities during the three-day festival itself. For this reason, the time span between festivals has stretched from what was traditionally three years, first to five years and now to seven or eight. (This may also be a concession to modern life, having allowed the festival’s main day to fall on a weekend). At the conclusion of each great festival of the Santissimo Crocifisso, given today’s realities, no one can say with absolutely certainty that there will ever be another.