Settimana Santa, Enna

“What is a religious festival in Sicily?” Leonardo Sciascia once asked. “It would be easy to answer that it is anything but — it is, above all, an existential explosion.” Carmelo Stompo spent years following Sicily's feasts village by village, and one stayed with him above the others: Enna's Good Friday procession. “The extraordinary solemnity, with hundreds of hooded penitents parading endlessly through the city, in silence, gave me an unforgettable emotion. The grief of the funeral band's music, the Madonna swaying with the rocking gait of her bearers, all wrapped in a fog that makes everything more mysterious.” Enna's Good Friday dates back centuries, organised by lay confraternities identified by the colour of their habit and by symbols stitched onto capes passed down through generations. Stompo has returned to photograph it across a full decade, from 2015 to 2025.