Every year, two pre-teenage boys are chosen from the congregation of the Basilica of San Annunziata in Comiso. The boys are chosen for their voice in order to play the role of Angels and will be placed on the litter holding the basilica’s sacred effigy – “fercoli of the simulacra” and carried in procession throughout Easter day and late into the night.

Comiso is a town at the foot of the Hyblaean Mountains in southern Sicilly. Here an ancient, but little known celebration, is repeated every year, the festival is called Easter Comisana and has been documented since 1635 but certainly was held prior to this and takes place inside the Basilica of San Annunziata.

The dressing of the Angels begins in their respective homes at five in the morning and takes about three hours for the dress to be sewn on to the two chosen children.

My return to Comiso after so many years had a special meaning for me. My father was born there, he died when I was still a boy. So was my grandfather Raffaele, he emigrated to Paterson in America but returned to open the first photographic laboratory in the country.

The cataloging of the Angels and the displays, attempting to grasp the sentiment of the Sicilian province with some irony, gives Memory to the Angels and my loved ones, of whom I have collected many photos. This is the sense of the work that has been inspired by the spectical of this religious festival.

The photos shown on the site are only a small number of those that will be part of a book to be released in 2021.

Carlo Rovelli from “The Order of Time”:

“.. But there is a third ingredient that underpins our identity, and it is probably the essential one, the one for which this discussion appears in a book on time: memory.

We are not a set of independent processes, in successive moments.

Every moment of our existence is linked with a peculiar triple thread to our past – the one immediately preceding it and the one most past.

We are stories for ourselves.

Stories. “