To talk about the processions of the Holy Friday in Sorrento means to open, at the same time, a uniform and differentiated argument.
In the peninsula the task of organizing the several Processions of the Holy Week, which develop along the street and squares of Sorrento and its outskirts between the Thursday and the Holy Friday, is concern of the numerous lays confraternities that for centuries re-propose the evangelic message for love and charity toward our fellow creatures. In Sorrento, especially, there are two manifestations that take place on the Holy Friday.
One take place in the middle of the night between the Thursday and the Holy Friday; the other the night of the "Sacred Mournful day". 

The same celebration of the Procession of the Death Christ in the evening of the Holy Friday seems to give more meaning to this belief. In fact, it would represent the finding by Mary of her Son, dead on the cross; the participant in this case wear black habit and black hood, preceding the Statue of the Our Lady of Sorrow; a beautiful Simulacrum of the Dead Christ by an unknown sculpture is carried on shoulders.

The roots of these Processions are very old and probably go back to the 1500. At that time it was
Tradition of the Confraternity to visit the towns' Churches and Monasteries, where the Sepulchres were prepared, in the evening of the Holy Thursday.
The procession was very simple: some brothers in plain dress went through the towns' streets with alight lamps, singing psalms and carrying a nude cross between two lances.

It is probable that only around 1700, under the domination of the Spanish viceroyalty and for the influence of the Jesuit priests, very numerous at that time in the Reign of Naples. The parades were enriched with alight objects, such as torches and lamps; with the Confraternity's symbols, standard and draping, and the famous "Mysteries" and "Martyrs" were added, that is to say the symbols of the material offences received by Christ during his ascent through the Golgotha. Then it comes the turn of about 200 singers of the Miserere that in a unique emotional atmosphere make the words of the psalmist David to re-echo. It represents the population in its penitence that invokes the Divine mercifulness for the crime committed against His only Begotten Son.

It is important to remind that initially only the brothers and the Franciscan Friars of the local convent, very numerous at that time, used to participate at the Procession of the Dead Christ.
Only when the friars were removed from Sorrento on the bases of the destroying laws of the Church Estate by a decree of Giuseppe Bonaparte, then King of Naples, in 1806, the Brother "invited" other Sorrentinian to participate to the Procession.