Representation of Good Friday in Vittoria

Source: Municipality of Vittoria

This tradition is all Victorian and has existed practically since its foundation. From 1657 the Congregation of the Most Holy Crucifix had the task of carrying out a solemn procession on Good Friday from the Mother Church to Calvary and back. The Congregation of the SS. Crocifisso di Vittoria Founded on 20 May 1644 by the Ven. Father Luigi La Nuza SJ with the name of Congregation Secreta de '33. Reformed in 1657, again by the Jesuit Fathers, in 1678 it was aggregated to the Archconfraternity of the SS. Crucifix of S. Marcello al Corso in Rome. Since then, the congregation has defied adversity and political upheavals, managing to survive all the other brotherhoods (more than a dozen) present in Vittoria. He instituted and handed down, almost without any change, the organization of the Good Friday processions in Vittoria, that of the South with which the Divine Simulacrum is accompanied at Calvary and that of the evening when, after the Sacred Representation as well as the urn, the fercoli and even Calvary itself. From its foundation to today, the Congregation has brought together all the elders of the city who competed in donations so that what the people called, then as now, "a festa ro Signuri" became more and more sumptuous and engaging, managing to be, together with that of the Patron saint, St. John the Baptist, the most popular and most loved by the Victorians.

 

The Good Friday procession, starting from 1669, was enriched by a play centered on the drama of the Passion in dialectal verses recited by commoners. In 1834, the Congregation had a wooden urn built to carry the dead Christ taken down from the cross and in 1858 the sacred representation was centered on the drama written by the Marquis Alfonso Ricca, still in use today. The Parthians represent the most heartfelt and loved tradition by the people of Vittorio Veneto, unique in the panorama of the province where they prefer to celebrate Easter Sunday. A tradition, that of Vittorio Veneto, which derives perhaps from the Spanish religiosity of the seventeenth century, all aimed at blood and the drama of death rather than resurrection.

The parts unfold around the writing of the Marquis Alfonso Ricca (1791-1850) from Vittoria, brother of the mother of Baron Serafino Amabile Guastella, a Chiaramonte demologist of the last century, a well-known writer, poet and essayist. The Rich is outlined as a lover of letters, of media culture, of political ideas based on principles of freedom. In addition to the Sacred Drama, there is no news of his other writings. The poem finds its first staging nine years after the death of its author (1859) and since then it has always been performed, excluding the periods of the two wars and 1957 when there was no Sacred Representation. It is composed of 450 loose hendecasyllable verses, in a nineteenth-century and romantic style, with certain morphological and thematic peculiarities that reveal a taste for rhetorical figures, for emphasis and declamation, for a not always spontaneous metric versification. The text echoes, in some cases transcribes, phrases, phrases, terms, which are inspired by indubitable classic if-forgetfulness to which the author inclined. Various researchers reiterate the inspiration of Ricca's writing in a sacred representation "The ransom of Adam in the death of Jesus", by Filippo Orioles, better known as Mortorio di Cristo, widely diffused and known in Sicily since 1750. drama of the Orioles ten are found in the text of Ricca. The themes that the work explores do not have a sacred depth. Rather, they present an epidermal religiosity on Manichean and contradictory dialectical elements. If we exclude some segments of true dramatic momentum in Mary and in that figure of anti-hero that is the sinister Misandro, the other characters are quite conventional, in whose verbalism a recurring miraculousness stands out, recognized as the primary reason for the universality of the Christian message and greatness. of its pronouncer.