Easter and ... Little Easter

Apparently in Italy, Easter Sunday is not enough. Pasqua as they call it, usually involves a trip to the church in the morning, then a nice meal with family. Up until now, this pretty much resembles our traditions in America. Although they do not have Easter egg hunts (nor the Easter Bunny, for that matter), they do have large chocolate eggs with a toy inside. A kind of hybrid between a Hershey's bar and a piñata, a uovo di Pasqua typically gets shattered to pieces before unwrapped. This way, when it is actually opened, the child can quickly retrieve the sorpresa inside and everybody else can start eating bite-size pieces of chocolate from the shell.

This relatively small uovo di Pasqua was kicked into pieces when it still had its wrapper. From this we learned that smashing on the ground seems to have a better effect.

So even though they get to have loads of fun cracking open giant chocolate eggs, the entertainment does not stop there. Unlike in the United States, where the Monday after Easter is just another normal workday that happens to have a lot of candy left over from Easter egg hunts, in Italy, they celebrate Pasquetta. Literally, this means "Little Easter" and is a nice addition to a holiday that is typically family-oriented. While Easter Sunday is almost always spent at home or at a relative's house, Pasquetta is when young people go and celebrate Easter with their friends. Since this year Easter came late, the weather was nice enough to spend long hours outside, so my friends and I got together up in the hills and had a picnic. Apparently, other people were doing similar picnics or having a grigliata, which is more or less comparable to a barbecue. 

At our picnic everybody brought a dish from home to make for a nice large meal.

Like any good Italian picnic, this one included salami. And only one person who knew how to slice it the right way. 

After about two hours of sitting down on blankets eating our various delicacies, we played calcio (soccer) for a while, and then I showed them how to play kickball. For us Americans, it is quite a simple concept - it's just baseball except that you roll and kick the ball instead of pitch and hit. But for Italians who do not have this common baseball background, I had to start from scratch, explaining everything from the positions to the bases to strikes and outs and innings. They actually caught on pretty quickly and by the end some were even understanding the difference between tag-outs and force-outs. 


Once the afternoon started to turn into evening, we all went back to our blankets, one friend pulled out his guitar, and the rest of us sang along, played cards, and had a colomba di Pasqua which is a large, sweet bread made specifically and exclusively for Easter.


At around 7 PM we all went our separate ways and cringed at the fact that we had only the next day left of Easter vacation. Then it was back to school on Wednesday (today).