If you are in Sorrento in the Easter period, you can attend a strong historical tradition, repeated year after year: the Holy processions of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday in the Holy week, the one before Easter.
This procession goes back in the Medieval Age, when some monks walked the street of the town carrying a cross and singing psalms.
The city of Sorrento organizes above all two processions, LA BIANCA the ‘White’ one and LA NERA the ‘Black’ one.
The white procession is organized by the Santa Monica Confraternity in the night between Thursday and Friday before Easter.
Its name comes from the color of the habits the participants wear in silence, with their face hidden under the hoods: the procession recalls the wandering of Our Lady that goes in search of Jesus, captured and sentenced to death.
It is the suggestive prelude to Good Friday when the Confraternity ‘Death and prayer’ organizes the black procession.
Here the habit of hooded and the dress of the Madonna are black because they recall Mary, who finally discovered his son dead on the cross.
During both the processions, Sorrento is in total silence, with the lights turned out and the shops closed while the hooded men proceed with their march illuminated by weak torches, accompanied by singing in Gregorian style.
The whole atmosphere recalls the desperate moments of death and passion of Christ.
The pathos of processions in the Holy Week succeeds in engaging local people and tourists, today as in the past: it is a show that literally thrills everybody!