Our Lady of Mount Carmel Feast and Lu Muluni Watermelon Festival

An August festival between faith and tradition

In the heart of summer, Racalmuto — a village in the province of Agrigento, Sicily — dedicates the last three days of the second week of August to the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It is an event that unites religious and popular dimensions, where Marian devotion merges with rural harvest rites and the conviviality of crowded squares, from Friday to Sunday.

The Sagra di lu Muluni

The most anticipated event is the Sagra di lu Muluni, the historic watermelon festival (muluni in the Sicilian dialect), which reached its forty-second edition in 2025. In the evening, around 10:00 PM, the square transforms into a great collective celebration with the distribution of watermelons, the pigliata di la 'ntinna — the ancient greasy pole game where participants climb a pole to claim the prize at the top — and other traditional games that delight both young and old.

Cuccìa and harvest rituals

Alongside the festival, an ancient and deeply identity-defining gesture remains alive: the preparation of cuccìa, wheat cooked with other legumes that neighborhood families offer to friends and relatives as a sign of gratitude for the harvest. It is a ritual that links the festival to the farming and mining culture of Racalmuto, a town shaped for generations by work in the sulfur mines.

The procession and the band

The religious day is marked by solemn mass, followed by the distribution of cuccìa and the procession of the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which winds through the streets of the neighborhood accompanied by the devotion of the faithful and the notes of the Giuseppe Verdi town band. Sounds, lights, and scents accompany the people of Racalmuto through the streets of the historic center, in an atmosphere of participation that is renewed every year.

A defining local event

The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Sagra di lu Muluni represent one of the most heartfelt events of the Racalmuto summer: an opportunity to rediscover the traditions of the Municipality of Racalmuto and to experience the authentic hospitality of the Agrigento province, amidst faith, popular gastronomy, and games of the past.