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February 20, 2005

Kim Hart Designs

What's that you say? Kim was finally coerced into naming her business (it only took my friends and I six months to do it!). I have put up a temporary page for her. She is having an online store website designed and hopefully that will be up soon. If you look on her temporary page, you will see an email list that you can put your email into. This will let you receive notifications when she has updated her page. She also has a guestbook that you can shout howdy into.

Click here: Kim Hart Designs

And yes, I am VERY excited for her!

Posted by DebC at 12:17 AM

February 06, 2005

Carnivale

While we have been here over two years, this is the first year that we have attended Carnivale in Catania. Being a devout Roman Catholic country, each city in Italy has a patron saint (or five). These saints each have a day dedicated to either their birth or death. Catania's patron saint is Saint Agata (Agatha in English). Oy, what a horrible, disturbing story hers is.** I will paratell it in the usual Deb style. I refuse to be held responsible for mistelling the story.

Saint Agata was purportedly born in Catania (or Palermo, depending on your source) and was an extremely chaste/devout and very beautiful young lady. The emperor at the time decided to add her to his harem but she absolutely would not allow it. So, said emperor became very pissed and even sent in a hooker to try to humiliate this girl into submission. Still no dice. So, this yahoo decides to chop off her breasts and throw the girl into prison (oh and there was a little something about hot coals too), where she died of her wounds. Because she was so true to her faith, she was made a saint. She is portrayed in paintings and bas reliefs holding a tray with her breasts. Somewhere along the line, somebody confused the tray of lopped off breasts with bread and to this day, during carnivale (which is like Mardi Gras) she blesses bread. Now, of course, somebody figured out the interpretive booboo and the "bread" has become boob cakes. (that link is the blog of my friend in Catania where we did in fact partake of said boob cakes)

But WAIT, that isn't the end of poor Saint Agata's story. Saints are not buried, their remains are kept in a church for viewing and hers were no different. Muslims invaded Sicily and held it for about 200 years. For some odd reason they decided to take her body as a spoil of war and removed it to their homeland (which actually may have been a good thing because usually they just completely desecrated the church). After 200 years of opression, a group of brave Sicilians decided to take back their saint. So they hiked it on over to the bad guys land and took it back. But in order for them to get it across the border, they had to take the body apart and put it into separate suitcases so that they would not be discovered. Among several miracles that happened, one has it that at one point a suitcase WAS opened but in it was roses instead of the body part.

Once back at the church where she belonged, her body parts were placed into a huge shrine with 11 different smaller shrines called candelore "can-duh-lore-ay" around it(I am sure there is a significance but I don't know it. Each one of these has a little bit of her story in beautiful art around the shrine. The top of the shrine has a huge ball of roses. The main two ton shrine is on a rolling platform. The candelore weigh about a ton a piece and are actually on a platform that is designed to be picked up and carried (by a group of very strong men!) down the street in a path that travels a route between the prison where she was originally tortured, around to all the shops (where the shop owners pay honor to her)and then back to the prison again (which has been turned into her church). The prison is at the top of a steep hill and it is considered to bring good luck to the city if they make it up the hill. It is incredibly dangerous for both the guys carrying this thing and the crowd watching - a young guy was killed doing it last year. Anyway, this processional takes more than a day to complete and goes continuously around the clock. They have to pick it up, move really fast for about 15 feet and then put it down.

So back to Carnivale in general, February 3rd is the first day of it and that is the all out party in the streets, fire works until you can't hear day. Our nanny took Seth up to a nearby town for the children's version of it. This is the day kids put on costumes (they don't celebrate Halloween here) and she dressed Seth up as a musketeer. Saturday is the actual Saint's day (Feb 5th) and is the day of the above mentioned processional. We went to my friend Wendy's house in downtown Catania and had a great time. Pictures in the gallery.

**Saint Agatha has also become the patron saint of breast cancer victims. Her story is taken as an allegory with the emperor serving as breast cancer itself.

Technical non-sequitor: you now have to type in a security code in order to comment. If you don't see the code, hit post and you will then get an error where you will then see the code. I had to do this to get rid of the knuckleheads that think comments are a good way to advertise really inappropriate stuff.

Posted by DebC at 05:00 PM