La Festa del Pane: Food, Devotion and Ethnic Identity, The Feast of San Francesco di Paola, Toronto

Abstract Every year, on the third Sunday of May, the Sicilian Salemi community in Toronto holds a religious festa in honor of San Francesco di Paola. On average, the celebration attracts five to six thousand people and includes a special Mass and panegyrics followed by a street procession of the saint's statue, a life size-figure draped in ribbons pinned with money as votive offerings. The statue is accompanied by a musical band, church and committee officials, society standard bearers, Third Order members, and other devotees. The event is a fairly typical Italian immigrant festa except for two central, unique features, both associated with food: i.e., the pietanze meal just prior to Mass, involving the ritual feeding of thirteen children in a tent enclosure adjacent to the church and the nearby display of a spectacular “chapel” or shrine (the cena) covered entirely in oranges, lemons and ornately shaped breads of every size. This paper examines this feast, and its food associations in particular, as a religious and ethnic evenet. Food, of course, is about more than taste and nutrition. It is also, as Roland Barthes writes, “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior.” The preparation, display and distribution select foods in the San Francesco di Paola feast have symbolic importance as conduits of social, religious, and cultural meaning. The same is said about the Salernitan immigrants' sense of themselves as Catholics and as Sicilian- and Italian-Canadians in modern-day Tornoto. The annual, public reenactment of the festa, now approaching its thirtieth year, highlights the significance placed on the presentation of communal (regional, national, and religious) identity. This is manifest especially in the symbology and rituals surrounding the display and distribution of the feast's most striking features–the pietanze meal and the cena breads.