For the Crucifix they hold the cunnutta di torci: mules and horses in festive harness parade loaded with wheat, in thanks for the year's harvest, and those leading them carry a lit candle dressed with a bunch of flowers. A Christian procession, with a much older farming rite inside it.
The town has its licence to settle from the early seventeenth century, but it grew slowly: fifty years on there were five hundred souls. It was the Filangieri who really made it, with the Castello quarter and the eighteenth-century Baglio, where the theatre is today. Then came gypsum, worked family by family, and emigration, and in the 1970s the houses built with the money sent home. There are 3,377 residents.
Sfincione · Arancina · Pasta alla Norma
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Next up: Saint Joseph, patron of a town near the Arab baths of Cefalà Diana, Friday 19 March
Nearest airport: Palermo Falcone-Borsellino, 46 km away
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📅 Every year, on 19 March
Villafrati celebrates Saint Joseph on 19 March; the town belongs, together with Marineo, Cefalà Diana, Godrano and Bolognetta, to a union of municipalities within whose territory stand the famous Baths of Cefalà, Arab-style thermal buildings.
Tall, soft bread dough, tomato, onion, anchovies, oregano and caciocavallo: sfincione is Palermo's focaccia, cut into squares.
Read more →Saffron rice, ragù with peas and caciocavallo cheese inside a golden crust. Round and feminine in Palermo, pointed and called arancino in Catania: the quarrel is serious.
Read more →Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
