Holy Week in Teramo is marked by a processional system consisting of two long complementary corteges: a pre-dawn procession, known as the Desolata, which unfolds during the night of Good Friday until well after dawn, and a procession of the Dead Christ, with its funerary catafalque and the scenic apparatus of the Passion, held on the afternoon of the same day. The celebrations are today organised by the Archconfraternity of the Cinturati, founded in 1262 and based in the church of Sant’Agostino, which since its establishment has been the exclusive promoter of the pre-dawn procession, and by the “most ancient and venerable” Archconfraternity of the Annunziata, of Suffrage and of the Blessed Sacrament, based in the church of the Annunziata and whose statutes — resulting from the fusion of the fourteenth-century Confraternity of the Annunziata with the seventeenth-century Confraternity of Suffrage — date back to 1789, as specified by the anthropologist Alessandra Gasparroni in her studies devoted to the Easter cycle of Teramo.

The pre-dawn procession in particular stands out for its uniqueness, the antiquity of its institution and the deep attachment of the citizens to the celebration, in which large numbers participate with heartfelt devotion despite the nocturnal hours and the biting cold that often accompanies the passage from winter to the first days of spring. After the visits to the Altars of Repose for the adoration of the Eucharist until midnight on Maundy Thursday, preparations for the Friday morning procession intensify within the church of Sant’Agostino: the wooden statue of the Madonna Addolorata, carefully cleaned and displayed upon the altar, becomes the object of the faithful’s veneration, as they pay their final respects before her departure through the streets of the city, while the bells are “bound” and forbidden to ring until Easter Sunday. The procession of the Desolata begins at four o’clock in the morning, following a tormented route that accompanies the Sorrowful Virgin in search of her Son through the churches of the historic centre where the Holy Sepulchre altars are arranged, pausing inside each church according to a consolidated ritual. At the same time, the chant Adoramus te, Christe is performed, a Gregorian antiphon generally associated with the liturgy of the Via Crucis. Along the route, the pie donne (“pious women”), dressed in mourning, follow the statue and take turns carrying it, intoning in unison devotional chants in Italian and Latin expressing the painful lament of the Mother — the so-called “laments of the Virgin” — interspersed with prayers and accompanied, “within a profoundly suspended and evocative atmosphere, by the background murmur of the crowd and by the urban soundscape with its spaces”, as emphasised by the ethnomusicologist Domenico Di Virgilio, who devoted detailed and thoroughly documented research to the sounds of the Teramo processions.

At the end of the mournful and grief-stricken itinerary, now fully aware of the sorrow awaiting her, the Desolata finally finds the body of Jesus in the church of the Annunziata, at the first light of dawn, laid within a sumptuous, canopied catafalque supported by angels. After the pause and the final farewell to her Son, the statue of the Madonna Addolorata completes the last stretch of its journey by returning to the church of Sant’Agostino, which receives her before the reunification in the Cathedral with the Dead Christ and the solemn funerary procession of the afternoon.