The vast cultural heritage of the old trades and Sicilian traditions is relived each year through the Living Crib and the activities of the Living Museum Association of Custonaci. Among the old trades recalled are

• U CURDARU (the rope maker)
• U ZABBARINARU (agave processing)
• I MANNARI (dairy production)
• U STRINCITURI (olive pressing)
• U FIRLIZZARU (the stool maker)
• U SELLARU (the saddle tanner)
• U PUPARO  (the puppeteer)
• U PIGNATARO (the tinker)

For a few days the life of the village is marked by the extraordinariness of the ordinary. In one area several farmers are ploughing the land, not far away others are pruning the vines, a little further on a blindfolded mule led by the halter threshes grain on the threshing floor. Piles of wheat are sifted and a man with a small millstone - mulineddu di petra - is grinding some of it. A little way off there is an oil mill - u trappitu - where the olives are brought for pressing. From here on, artisanal and domestic activities and all kinds of scenes follow one after the other.

A stonemason is cutting stone in his antu. There are sheep in the fold, a pigsty with a sow and her piglets, a chicken coop with chickens. Further on are the tinsmith, the bee keeper and the stazzunaru - the craftsman in terracotta who makes bricks or turns jars and containers, in the latter case the stazzunaru is also known as the mastru di tornu, master of the art of figulina (a very fine type of ceramic). In the farmyard, a few children are playing, some girls are washing clothes in a stone basin while the women are busy drying figs and preparing tomato extract, placing the fruit and the sauce on long wooden boards resting on makeshift supports. Another woman is plucking a chicken with hot water. Continuing along our route we come to the barber, the tavern, the antu of the zimmilaru, the artisan who makes rope from curina and brooms from giummara, parts of the dried dwarf palm. Near to him another is weaving ddisa (vine reeds for making ropes and fishing nets) while further on carteddi (baskets) are being made with reeds and olive canes. The carpenter’s workshop displays the tools of his trade - chisels, hammers, compasses, saws of various sizes. Meanwhile, the saddler is repairing saddles while a short distance away ricotta and cheese are being made. Past the Mangiapane Cave, where the Nativity is enacted with the ox and the donkey, a group of fishermen are waiting for their nets to be repaired while the nassaru (fish-trap maker) arranges piles of reeds for making the chiasta (funnel) and campa (bell) of a trap for shellfish, squid, octopus etc. In a house the oven is being lit while a woman is making bread with an arbitriu - a press for kneading the dough. Further on is the blacksmith’s forge; his neighbour, a builder, is putting the finishing touches to a wall. In a clearing, vegetables and fruit are being sold, a lamb is being roasted, a shepherd is making ricotta. Then come the knife-grinder, a collar maker, the tailor, the cooper, the cartwright who is about to rim a cartwheel, a charcoal burner from the mountains of San Vito Lo Capo, the wool carder.

The “actors” are for the most part men and women from Custonaci or nearby villages. They do not so much act their roles as genuinely live out the situations in which they were until very recently
key players. The artisans also re-enact in an unusual context the trades that they ply in Custonaci or in nearby places: Buseto Palizzolo, Castelvetrano, Trapani, Valderice. Genuine craftsmen then, and genuine also the activities they are carrying out, genuine, too, their gestures full of purpose.

Time and space no longer exist and so the original, mythical meaning of the event is recreated. Occupations which normally have specific seasonal cycles (ploughing, pruning the vines, the olive harvest) are here carried out simultaneously within a circumscribed space. The 'actors', just like the inanimate figures in a popular Crib, become "types" yet at the same time they belong to a specific world, the area of Trapani.

The Custonaci Crib is to be understood as a kind of "museographic" performance, in the sense that it is communicating knowledge, the value of which is of course clear to see. A performance of this kind, in fact, involves knowledge of one’s own territory and what it produces and the revival of a whole range of organised skills, part of an economic and social fabric which has for decades now been undergoing rapid transformation. In other words, due to the way in which it was conceived and organised the Living Crib of Custonaci gives an entire community an identity, whether with respect to material culture or to intellectual culture, by reviving its heritage in terms of knowledge and the manual skills associated with individual trades, even if it is for a limited period of time - although its potential effects do need to be assessed from a distance.

Trades are plied, they are depicted by doing. This provides a rare opportunity to get to know them. The tools and the techniques associated with them speak through the people who can use them and through the things that are made with them. It is in this sense that it is a museographic performance, a museography always yearned-for yet staged with difficulty and since it concerns exhibits which belong to material culture the problem arises of how to transform their substance, the place and the relations that they have with the social world.

At Custonaci, in essence, a community makes itself a memory, not so much to celebrate its own past as to lay its own foundations and consolidate itself in a present in which the future appears uncertain.