SANCTI ET HOMINES "feste religiose in Sicilia"

Sancti et Homines is a photographic project that I started once year ago and that I will carry on for some more time. It is a large project, which deals with the many aspects of religious sentiment in Sicily. There have been numerous photographers who have immortalized these events so much followed and participated; among these, Ferdinando Scianna inspired me, with the photographs of him published in the book "Religious festivals in Sicily" in 1965, by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia. At one point in the plot of the book, Sciascia wonders what a religious festival really represents in Sicily, and the answer to the question struck me strongly, making me fully aware of what I got to see in the festivals I attended: "It would be easy to answer that it is anything but a religious holiday. It is, above all, an existential explosion; the explosion of the collective id, in a country where the collectivity exists only at the level of the id. Since it is only in the feast that the Sicilian comes out of his condition of man alone, which is the condition of his vigilant and painful super-ego, to find himself part of a class, of a class, of a city."