When we arrived in Monopoli (one city) on Friday morning, we found the Puglia tourist info office right where we thought it should be...on the Piazza Vittorio, the main square. And it was open! One of the first things we learned was that in the evening there would be the annual procession of the ciry’s venerated Madonna, the Madonna della Madia. As we later learned, in 1107, the bishop of Monopoli was building a new church, Romanesque style, but they didn’t have the proper wood beams for the ceiling, and so the construction was delayed. Ten years later, in 1117, a Monopolitan, a lay person in the city, had a dream that the beams that were needed for the construction would be found in the port. Indeed, in a procession to the port, the bishop found a huge raft made of the wood beams needed to build the new church ceiling. Moreover, on the raft, there was an icon of the Madonna and child. It seems as if Spanish was the lingua franca, because the Madonna was on the almadÃa, or the raft. So, in Italian, it is the Madonna della zattera, or keeping closer to the original Spanish, the Madonna della Madia.
We found the procession winding through the streets, with the Madonna della Madia carried on the shoulders of priests from the Chiesa della Madia in an hour long procession of Monopoli, which was decorated with lights on the Piazza Vittoria.
No comments:
Post a Comment