The history of the Procession of the Misteri of Trapani

The Cilio, an offering of candles to Our Lady, is the oldest and most popular ceremony of the Monday after Easter. Each guild at that time gathered around her candle and the candle procession expressed the reunification of the Civitas through the reaffirmation of the guilds that are the basis of social life and established order, of whose patron saint, Our Lady of Trapani, was the guarantor. In the process of replacing the ancient ceremony of the Cilio with the Misteri, the craft guilds (or workers) were involved by assigning a group of statues to each of them, from the first two decades of the seventeenth century. With the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1773, the procession has accentuated its appearance of a civic holiday, depending directly on the Senate, the municipal authorities, and by the consuls (chiefs) of the workers. The feast has, of course, undergone various changes over time and the wooden statues which have been gradually destroyed have been replaced. Most of those which take place in today’s procession, originally carved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have been rebuilt or restored after the disastrous bombing of the city in 1940-1941.