Since Italy is a religious country Easter is celebrated everywhere and in different ways, even by the ones who are not religious. I’m sure there are many traditions in whole Italy but in this text I am going to talk about the ones which are famous in my region, Apulia.
Starting from Palm Sunday I can say that people are used to go to church in the morning, especially the masses at 10 am are full of children and parents. The tradition is that people, after the Sunday mass, exchange crosses which are done with palm leaves, to wish peace to the others.
It is known that in this festivity, people who were in conflict before try to solve their issues and gift the other a real small olive tree. Palm Sunday is a day which brings people closer and allow them to make peace with one another.
Concerning Easter, it is a bigger festivity than the Palm Sunday since it marks the resurrection of Jesus. Of course also in this day it is tradition to partecipate to the morning mass. But the biggest traditions have their bases in the italian cuisine. For Easter, as also for Christmas, families are brought together to celebrate this festivity and they have Easter lunch together. It is tradition to eat lamb and hard boiled eggs. Besides, there are two famous sweet dishes that are eaten on Easter: one is almost always handmade, the other one can be bought. The first sweet dish is called “Scarcelle”. It is basically a simple dough made out of flour, eggs, sugar and milk, which gets shaped into Easter-like shapes, for example: a bunny, an egg or a dove. After the baking, the shapes are decorated with sprinkles or chocolate eggs. It is tradition to decorate the “scarcella” with an hard boiled egg at the center to represent the body of Christ.
The second sweet dish is calles “Colomba”, which literally translates to “dove”, because it is what it represents. It is an egg based dough, shaped like a dove, baked and finally decorated with white sugar sprinkles and almonds on top.
But the modern symbol of italian Easter is the chocolate egg. It is tradition to gift kids and adults a big chocolate egg with a surprise inside. It can be bought in normal stores or it can be done in a pastry shop and the surprise can be personalized. People have hidden engagement rings in easter eggs as a surprise! Kids (and adults) wait for the Easter time to enjoy their chocolate eggs.
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