All Souls’ Day

Today nobody is celebrated: we remember everyone who is no longer with us. The commemoration of the dead began as a specific institution: it was established in 998 by Saint Odilo, abbot of Cluny, who ordered all the monasteries under him to pray for the dead on the day after All Saints’. From Cluny, then the largest monastic network in Europe, the custom spread everywhere. The Churches understand it in different ways: Catholics pray for the souls in purgatory, while Lutherans and Anglicans remember believers who have died as the “faithful departed.” But the gesture is the same everywhere. In Italy this is one of the most deeply felt days there is, and everyone keeps it in their own way. In Sicily the dead bring sweets to the children, who find them hidden around the house on the morning of the 2nd. In Naples there’s the long, long bond with the souls in purgatory, the *capuzzelle* of the Fontanelle cemetery, the skulls adopted and cared for by the people who adopt them — a popular devotion the Church has eyed with suspicion and that has never quite died out. The Neapolitan Smorfia puts the souls in purgatory at number eighty-five. And there’s something people say today more than ever: as long as someone speaks your name, you haven’t completely gone.