Throughout Sicily, people celebrate the dead of their own and their family places on 2 November (read more about La festa dei morti here). In the past even with banquets in front of graves, in cemeteries. (St Ambrose expressly forbade them, as they were believed to be widespread throughout Italy).
A combination of remembrance for ancestors, a desire to preserve the future from the uncertainties of the coming year (one starts sowing the seeds on the Day of the Dead) and attachment to traditions that go back as far as the Romans, the Greeks, the Indo-European matrices. Children wait for sweets, toys, gifts of all kinds.
And so here for you is a nice Sicilian nursery rhyme, a bit wacky and funny, but one that takes us back in time!
Chi ti purtaru i morti?
U pupu cu l’occhi torti (a pupa cu l’anchi torti)
U attu chi sunava
U surci chi abballava
Veni la zita
ca’ vesti di sita
La sita si vagna
alla faccia di to nanna.
To nanna muriu
e chiddu chi voli Diu
Veni so cugnata ca’ vesti riccamata
Veni u baruni cu i causi a pinnuluni
Veni u tavirnaru cu na buttigghia na manu
tirituppiti e lariula’
pisci frittu e baccalà
What did the dead bring you?
A puppet with crooked eyes (a puppet with crooked hips)
A cat that played
A mouse that danced
Comes the girl
In a silk dress
The silk gets wet
In your grandmother’s face
Your grandmother died
And what God wants
Your sister-in-law comes
With her embroidered robe
A baron came
with pendulous breeches
Comes a tavernkeeper
with a bottle in his hand
tirituppiti and lariula’
fried fish and codfish.
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