Monterosso Almo Prepares to Close Its Feast Season With Maria Santissima Bambina
The Iblean hill town's celebrations, under way since last Sunday, culminate on 4 October in the festa esterna of its venerated Marian effigy.
In Monterosso Almo the feast of Maria Santissima Bambina begins in the dark and with noise. The programme for Sunday 4 October opens at first light with the traditional firing of cannon shots — the signal, in this Iblean hill town, that its most keenly felt religious appointment of the year has arrived. By then the streets will be filling around the venerated Marian effigy, which the community is preparing to accompany through a day its local chroniclers describe as one of emotion, devotion and popular tradition.
The celebrations are not confined to the feast day itself. The liturgical moments began last Sunday, and the days since have been given over to preparation and participation. Sunday's festa esterna is presented in the local accounts not only as a moment of intense spirituality but as the symbolic close of the calendar of great religious feasts that have animated the summer and the beginning of autumn in the mountain town — a sequence that has now reached its culminating point.
Midweek brought one of the more reflective passages of that programme. Last Wednesday the community observed the feast of San Girolamo alongside the Giornata della Parola, the Day of the Word, whose catechesis took as its theme "Maria e Francesco: piccoli per lasciare spazio a Dio" — Mary and Francis, small in order to leave space for God. It was an occasion, the reports note, for meditating on the value of humility and of entrustment to the Lord. Around this religious calendar, the same accounts record, participation by the faithful has remained substantial, confirming the strength of the town's attachment to its Marian tradition.
Alongside the devotional programme run recreational initiatives, among them a concert by Deborah Iurato announced as part of the festivities. That the two registers — liturgy and popular festivity — proceed together is presented in the coverage not as a curiosity but as the ordinary shape of the occasion, one that families, the young and the elderly have joined within a shared path of faith.
On Sunday morning the cannon will fire before most of the town is awake. Whatever the rest of the day brings, the feast will have announced itself first by sound, to a still-dark sky over the Iblean hills.