Festivals in Sicily: A Traveler's Guide to Ancient Rites and Other Celebrations

Festivals in Sicily are more than just dates on a calendar. 

Picture arriving in Trapani on Good Friday or Palermo in mid-July and finding an entire city moving in step with a procession, fireworks, or folk dancers.

This guide walks you through the island's festival year—from winter carnivals and spring Holy Week rites to summer patron-saint celebrations and autumn food sagre—so you can match your trip to the rituals, colors, and flavors you most want to experience.

Saint George, the dragon slayer, is the patron saint of Ragusa. His church is in Ragusa Ibla, where people celebrate festivities in his honor in late April/early May. (Photo: Maurizio Moro5153/Wikimedia Commons)

Festivals Around the Year

Most festivals in Sicily follow the liturgical year with monastic precision, punctuated by harvest celebrations that honor the earth's bounty in this volcanic soil.

The major festivals cluster around Easter and the summer months, when the island's heat becomes itself a character in the drama, a solar deity pressing down upon people.

Here's how the festival year in Sicily unfolds by season:

Festivals in Sicily: Calendar for Travelers

Easter

Holy Week transforms whole Sicily into a theater of sorrow and redemption.

From Palm Sunday through Easter, nearly every town stages its own passion play, each with variations that reflect local history and the particular character of devotion that has developed over the centuries.

Processione dei Misteri in Trapani

In Trapani, the Processione dei Misteri unfolds across twenty continuous hours, a marathon of faith that begins on Good Friday afternoon and does not release its participants until the following day.

Twenty groups of life-sized wooden statues, the Misteri, are carried through the streets by hooded confraternities whose membership passes from father to son - bit like a devotion to a particular football team.

The bearers move with a peculiar swaying gait called the annacata. This rhythmic rocking makes the statues appear to breathe, to suffer, to live.

To witness this procession, arrive in Trapani by Thursday evening and secure your position along Via Garibaldi or near the Chiesa del Purgatorio, where the Misteri begin their journey.

The procession follows a fixed route through the old town. You may join the throng at any point. However, the most potent moments occur in the hours before dawn when exhaustion and devotion blur into a single state of heightened consciousness.

Processione dei Confrati in Enna

Enna, perched at nine hundred meters above sea level in Sicily's mountainous interior, stages a different drama entirely.

Here, the Processione dei Confrati on Good Friday features two thousand hooded penitents moving through narrow streets. The confraternities wear pointed hoods that completely obscure their faces.

The procession begins at sunset and continues through the night, illuminated by candles that cast dancing shadows on medieval facades.

Spend at least two nights in Enna if you wish to experience both the Good Friday procession and the Easter Sunday celebration, when the statue of the Risen Christ is carried through the same streets in triumph, the mood transforming from lamentation to jubilation over forty-eight hours.

One of the many brotherhoods marching in the streets of Enna. (Photo: Max Ponzi)

Other Religious Festivals

Festival of Saint Agatha in Catania

The Festival of Saint Agatha in Catania, held annually from the third through the fifth of February, rivals Holy Week in scale and intensity.

Saint Agatha, the city's patron and protector, was martyred in the third century; her feast day draws hundreds of thousands of devotees who fill Catania's streets in a display of devotion that borders on the ecstatic.

The festival's centerpiece is the fercolo, a massive silver reliquary containing the saint's relics, weighing nearly 2 tons and requiring 100 men to carry.

The procession follows a route of more than 12 kilometers through Catania's historic center.

The Feast of Saint Joseph in Salemi

The Feast of Saint Joseph on March 19 is celebrated throughout Sicily, particularly in Salemi, where elaborate altars called "tavole di San Giuseppe" are erected in private homes and public spaces.

These altars are laden with breads shaped into symbolic forms—crosses, staffs, fish, flowers—and other foods that are blessed and then distributed to the poor.

The tradition honors Saint Joseph as protector of the vulnerable and provider for the hungry.

Visit Salemi on March eighteenth and nineteenth to see the altars, which are opened to the public for viewing and veneration. The breads are works of art, their crusts golden and glossy, their shapes intricate as medieval manuscripts.

Spring Flower Festivals

The Infiorata festivals in Sicily are held in various towns during late May and early June, transforming streets into carpets of flower petals arranged in intricate religious and secular designs.

Almond Blossom Festival in Agrigento

The Sagra del Mandorlo in Fiore, the Almond Blossom Festival in Agrigento, takes place in late February or early March, when the almond trees burst into bloom, covering the Valley of the Temples in clouds of white and pink petals.

The festival includes folk music and dance performances, creating a multicultural celebration that contrasts beautifully with the ancient Greek temples standing sentinel over the proceedings.

Agrigento Almond Festival.

Infiorata di Noto

Noto celebrates Infiorata on the third Sunday of May, with Via Nicolaci covered in petal mosaics that extend for more than 100 meters.

Artists work through the year in preparation and through the night preceding the festival, arranging petals by color and shape to create images of saints, mythological scenes, and geometric patterns of breathtaking complexity.

Summer Festivals in Sicily

Summer in Sicily is one big sweaty celebration, with many festivals.

The Festival of Santa Rosalia in Palermo

The Feast of Saint Rosalia in Palermo, celebrated from July 10 through 15th, commemorates the city's deliverance from plague in 1624. That's when the saint's relics were discovered in a cave on Monte Pellegrino and, as the story goes, paraded around the city, until the plague was eradicated from the town.

The festival climaxes on July 14 with a procession in which a massive float bearing Saint Rosalia's statue is pulled through the city streets, followed by fireworks over the harbor.

If you want to get the most out of it, plan your visit to Palermo for the festival's final days, when the city's energy reaches its peak.

Palermo has long celebrated the Festival of Santa Rosalia. Here, it is depicted in a 1855 painting by Pasquale Mattej.

Palio dei Normanni in Piazza Armerina

The Palio dei Normanni in Piazza Armerina, held in mid-August, recreates the Norman conquest of Sicily through a historical pageant and jousting tournament.

Knights in armor charge down the lists, their lances aimed at rings suspended from posts, while the crowd cheers from wooden stands erected in the town's main square.

The pageant includes hundreds of participants in medieval costume, representing the various factions and powers that contested Sicily in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The event unfolds over several days, with processions, flag-throwing competitions, and medieval markets selling crafts and foods prepared according to historical recipes.

Messina's August festival also includes the Palio, a horse race around the perimeter of the city's main square, and fireworks over the town.

Palio dei Normanni in Piazza Armerina. (Photo: Vincenzo Fileccia)

Festival of Saint Sebastian in Palazzolo Acreide

If you are more interested in seeing the people doing the heavy lifting than horses, the Festival of Saint Sebastian in Palazzolo Acreide might be just for you.

It is held in August—the hottest month—and features a procession in which the saint's statue is carried through the streets by devotees who run—with the heavy platform on their shoulders—quickening their pace as they approach the church.

The run is both an athletic feat and a spiritual exercise. The statue weighs several hundred kilograms, and the bearers accelerate through the narrow streets, the crowd pressing back against walls to avoid being trampled.

When the runners finally reach the church steps, they perform a series of rapid bows, dipping the statue low before lifting it high, until exhaustion forces them to stop.

Autumn Food Festivals

Many food festivals in Sicily celebrate the island's culinary heritage with reverence equal to that accorded its saints. Autumn is the harvest season for grapes, pistachios, and olives... Each of them has its own celebration.

Pistacchio Festival in Bronte

The Sagra del Pistacchio in Bronte, held in late September or early October, honors the pistachio harvest with tastings, cooking demonstrations, and markets where you may purchase the green gold that grows on the slopes of Mount Etna.

Bronte's pistachios are protected by designation of origin; their flavor—intense, slightly sweet, with notes of resin and earth—is unmatched anywhere in the world.

Cous Cous Festival of San Vito Lo Capo

San Vito Lo Capo celebrates its Cous Cous Fest in late September. It celebrates the Arab influence on Sicilian cuisine. If you are a fan of cous cous, or good food in general, this is the place to be.

The festival takes over the town's famous beach, with cooking stations set up on the sand and judges sampling dishes from Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and Sicily itself.

Cous Cous Fest in San Vito lo Capo. (Photo: Daniele Pugliesi)

Other Festivals

You'll find many smaller festivals in Sicily in nearly every town and village throughout the year. You'll find these in the festival calendar at the beginning of this page, but it's impossible to keep track of all of them.

You might also find posters affixed to street poles or notices in town squares for some local festivals, with their dates and details passed by word of mouth rather than through official channels.

Or, you can ask the local tourist office, the desk of your hotel, or the owner of your holiday apartment.

(February 11, 2026)

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