Between the eighties and the nineties of the last century, while I still was a young photographer looking for my own path, I decided to approach an issue, that at that time appeared to me definitely exotic: Sicily. I was guided by the influence of two Sicilian masters: Enzo Sellerio and Ferdinando Scianna, with his book about religious Easter festivity and rites in the island. But more than anything else, I was challenged by the idea of finding out if, as citizen of the North Italy, I could ever understand a world, that in that period seemed to me very distant either geographically as well as culturally. So, for many years, almost every year, I loaded my old and clapped-out Renault 4 and boarded on the ferry on route between Genova and Palermo. Of course I was searching for those rites of religious Easter festivities in between religion and ancestral traditions, and the traces of this Island-State located in the middle of Mediterranean sea, which for history and geography has always been a separate reality from the rest of the country, but also I was looking for signs of change, which in those years started to be obvious, signs of change which for better or for worse were making the island economically and culturally more and more homologated to the rest of Italy.