On the morning of November 2, children in Palermo get up early and search the house. Presents have appeared overnight, under the bed or behind a door, and the family knows exactly who left them: the dead. Usually a grandparent. It’s All Souls’ Day, the Festa dei Morti, and Palermo has spent centuries turning it into a day for children.
Visitors mostly meet the feast through glass. In the weeks before the 2nd, pastry windows fill up with painted sugar knights, marzipan figs, glazed ring biscuits and pale cookies called bones of the dead. Everything in there has a part in the story of the dead coming home for one night, and once you know the story the windows read very differently.
The Night the Dead Come Home
The idea is simple enough. On the night between November 1 and 2, the souls of the family’s dead come back for a visit, and they bring gifts. Children used to say a rhyme at bedtime to make sure they wouldn’t be forgotten:
Animi santi, animi santi,
io sugnu unu e vuiautri síti tanti:
mentri sugnu ‘ntra stu munnu di guai,
cosi di morti mittitimìnni assai.
Holy souls, holy souls, I’m only one and you are many; while I’m here in this world of troubles, leave me plenty of the dead’s presents. The last line is the point of the whole thing.
There was a threat to go with the promise. Children who had misbehaved were told the dead might come in the night and scratch their feet with a grater, so on the evening of November 1 the kitchen grater went into hiding. In the old days children also wrote letters to the dead with their wishes, much as children elsewhere write to Santa. Parents reminded them not to ask for too much. The dead, after all, were poor.
In the morning came the hunt. Later the family went to the cemetery to say thank you, often taking chairs and food along. Near the cemeteries, vendors sold muffoletta, a soft round bread eaten with olive oil and a salted sardine.
People here sometimes call the dead a Sicilian Santa Claus. The comparison works up to a point. Santa is imaginary, and the dead who leave the toys are people the family remembers by name, which makes the whole custom gentler than it sounds.
The date goes back to the end of the tenth century, when the abbey of Cluny set November 2 aside for praying for the dead, and the custom spread from there through Catholic Europe. What Palermo did with it is all its own. It kept the date and handed the day to the children.
Sugar Knights and Marzipan Fruit
The star of the windows is the pupo di zucchero, the sugar doll, also known as pupa a cena or, in Palermo shorthand, pupaccena. Each one is a hollow figure of hard sugar, made by pouring hot syrup into a two-part mold of plaster or terracotta, then painted by hand with food coloring once it sets. The front gets all the detail and color. The back is usually left smooth and plain.
The classic subject is a paladin, one of Charlemagne’s knights from the Sicilian puppet theater, in full armor and often on horseback. Orlando is the favorite, and like his puppet he’s traditionally cross-eyed. You’ll also find Sicilian carts and peasant women with tambourines. In recent years, as the craft has struggled, the dolls have shrunk and more of them are cartoon characters and superheroes.
Nobody knows exactly where the dolls came from, which hasn’t stopped anyone from telling stories. One credits a ruined Arab nobleman with guests coming to dinner and nothing to feed them, whose cook made the whole meal out of sugar. Another goes back to a banquet in Venice in 1574 for Henry III of France, where the tables were set with sugar sculptures; sailors brought the story home, and the dolls at dinner, pupi a cena, got their name.
Frutta martorana is almond paste shaped and painted to look like fruit: figs, prickly pears, wedges of watermelon, the occasional tomato. It’s sold all year, but this is its season. It’s also very sweet, with roughly twice as much sugar as almonds, so buy a few pieces before committing to a tray.
The name comes from the convent founded in 1194 by Eloisa Martorana and her husband next to the church of Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio, which later took the convent’s name and is still known as La Martorana. The best-known legend says the nuns were expecting an important visitor at a time when their garden was bare, so they made fruit out of almond paste and hung it on the trees. Tellers can’t agree on who the visitor was. In one version it’s an archbishop. In another it’s a king, who reached for an orange, tried to peel it and found himself holding marzipan.
Bones of the Dead and the Basket
Next to all that color, the biscuits look plain. Ossa di morto, bones of the dead (crozzi ‘i mottu in Palermo dialect), are made with flour, sugar and water, cinnamon and plenty of cloves, and no eggs or fat at all. The dough rests for days before baking. In the oven the top puffs up hard and white while the sugar underneath caramelizes into a dark base, so each biscuit looks like a little bone set on a slab of toffee. They are very hard. Dunk them in Marsala first if you’d like to keep your teeth.
Around them sits the rest of the family. Pupatelli are packed with toasted almonds. Taralli are rings under a hard sugar glaze. Tetù are small round cakes iced white or dark with cocoa, and they started out as a thrifty way to use up unsold pastry, which is about as Palermo as a sweet can get.
Traditionally much of this ends up in u cannistru, the basket children find on the morning of the 2nd. The bottom is lined with dried figs, nuts and bone biscuits. Marzipan fruit goes on top, and a sugar paladin stands guard over the lot. Older baskets held the season’s first mandarins and oranges as well, along with sorb apples kept in straw so they would last into the winter.
From the Olivella Toy Fair to Sugar Night
For generations the place to buy all this was the Fiera dei Morti, the fair of the dead. It used to fill the streets around Piazza Olivella, beside the archaeological museum, between Via Roma and the Teatro Massimo, a part of town better known these days for its bars. The toys were cheap and made of cardboard and wood, because plastic hadn’t arrived yet. There were little two-wheeled carts you pulled along by a handle, and puppets that clashed cymbals. Families with money went to Studer, a big toy shop full of German, Austrian and French imports, for pedal cars and rocking horses covered in real horsehide.
The fair has moved since then and now sits outside the old center. In 2026 it ran from October 27 to November 2 on the old Fiera del Mediterraneo fairgrounds on Via Sadat, with sweet stalls and rides. The city has added a newer festival around it, too. Notte di Zucchero, sugar night, filled the weekend of October 31 and November 1 with events for families. There was a pajama party at the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, and at the Teatro Massimo the first-tier boxes became tiny stages for drama students telling stories about memory. The festival’s full name, Festa di Morti, Pupi e Grattugie, translates roughly as a feast of the dead, sugar dolls and graters. This year it was twinned with Mexico City’s Día de Muertos.
The city’s own events listing also put three Halloween events next to the fair this year, one of them advertised as Halloween with no horror theme. Palermo has been taking the horror out of death for a long time.
If You Arrive in Early November
Land on or just after the 2nd and you’ve caught the tail end. The fair closes on November 2. Sugar dolls are seasonal, so if you want one, buy it in the first few days; frutta martorana is on sale all year. In 2026 the Fiera d’Autunno on Via Magliocco keeps going until November 8, with traditional food and games.
For marzipan fruit, I’d start at I Segreti del Chiostro, the pastry shop inside the Santa Caterina convent on Piazza Bellini, which bakes from the recipes of Palermo’s old convents. It’s a few steps from La Martorana, so you can see the church that gave the sweet its name and buy the sweet itself on the same morning. The church, with its gold mosaics, is one of the essential stops in this Palermo must-see guide. Look closely at the painting on the figs and prickly pears before you buy; the detail on the skins is where good work shows.
Ossa di morto are usually sold by weight. Get a mix of sizes, since the small ones soften faster when you dunk them, and keep a couple for the flight home. They’ll survive anything.
Palermo’s best-known festival is the Festino of Santa Rosalia in July, and that’s the one most travelers plan around. The first days of November deserve a place next to it. The summer crowds are long gone, and for a week the whole city is busy being sweet to its children in the name of the dead. For the markets and the street food, there’s more in this earlier look at Palermo.
And on the night of November 1, hide the grater.