But because the date isn’t fixed, if you’re not careful you’ll be tossed into Holy Week—the week leading up to Easter—and find yourself the only one left behind when all the schools, government offices, and supermarkets close. Man! It was only then that I realized that the reason the highways out of Milan into the suburbs were packed a few days before was because the Milanese were using their Easter vacation time to get out of the city.
Easter Day always falls on a Sunday, but which Sunday is determined by figuring out the first Sunday that falls after the full moon following the spring equinox.
It’s possible for the spring equinox to fall on March 20 or 21, since it’s affected by the time it takes for the earth to travel around the sun and by the inaccuracies in human calendars. Add the irregularity of the full moon cycles and Easter may fall a full twenty days apart in adjacent years. Before I got my mind around the variability of the Easter holiday, I was thrown off by my own misunderstanding year after year. Wait—isn’t Easter at the end of April? I’d think. It’s actually the end of March? Do I have my months wrong?
You definitely know when Easter is coming. After Christmas there’s another Christian holiday called Epiphany, then Carnival sometime around February, and then the city is quickly transformed for Easter. If you go to the supermarket, you’ll see egg-shaped chocolates in colorful packaging stacked from floor to ceiling. It’s a lot of fun feeling like you’ve gotten lost in a world of candy.
Regardless of their age, everyone gets chocolate eggs for presents—even sons and daughters who are long since grown, and kids throughout the family. It’s a tradition that results in piles of chocolate around lunchtime for families that celebrate Easter.
Among the chocolates, you’ll find colomba, a baked snack shaped like a dove. It symbolizes peace, and it is an essential part of Easter.
My niece who came to visit me in Italy during Easter bought some colomba. When she left, she couldn’t fit it in her regular carry-on bag, so she had no choice but to put it in a different bag and try to get through airport security—which has been really strict lately about the number, weight, and size of carry-on luggage. She was fully prepared to have it confiscated.
When the security officer asked her what it was, my niece simply replied, “colomba.” Fully expecting them to take it from her, she grabbed the colomba and headed to the next check stage—but nobody challenged her. As she moved on she could hear the officers talking behind her. “What was it?” “Colomba, she said.” “Colomba?” “Ah, colomba.” Several officers fired the word colomba back and forth but nobody said a thing to her as she moved on, passed through the rest of security, and boarded her plane without incident.
I hope this story makes it clear just how powerful a treat colomba is.
