Angel Monday, also known as Easter Monday, is the day following Easter, an Italian national holiday was introduced after the war, simply to lengthen the holiday. From a religious point of view, it gets its name from the fact that in scripture, this was the day after the resurrection of Christ when the women gathered in Jesus’ empty tomb, when an angel appeared to announce the resurrection of Jesus. It is not clear why tradition moved these events which happened on Easter morning, to the next day.
The misunderstanding can probably be attributed to a misinterpretation of the phrase “the day after Easter” written in the gospels. What5 is referred to as Easter, is in fact Jewish Easter, or Passover, which fell on a Saturday. This is the reason why the facts narrated would rightfully be placed the following morning, being Sunday.
Usually Easter Monday is a day that is organized well in advanced by Italian families who want to enjoy the first days of Spring outdoors with their loved ones. In many foreign countries this day is celebrated in very specific ways: the primacy surely goes to England, which organizes a so-called “Egg Rolling”, a game in which boiled eggs are rolled down a hill, the winning egg being the one that rolls down further. There’s also the Morris Dance, a traditional folk dance of pagan origins. Tradition has it that groups of predominantly male dancers, appear in ancient spring dances to scare away the winter spirits. They are dressed in white shirts, colored slashes, black pants and straw hats decorated with flowers and colored ribbons, who dance in the streets of the city to the sounds of tambourines, flutes, bagpipes.