Brognaturo

Brognaturo has its urban and spiritual heart in the parish church of Maria Santissima della Consolazione, a parish whose foundation certainly predates 1540 if in the decree appointing the rector of the local convent of SS. Annunziata, the bishop of the time stipulated that his rights be preserved. A double feast is linked to Our Lady of Consolation, on the first Sunday in September and on February 5 in memory of the protection granted to the community during the disastrous earthquake of 1783. The late summer feast constitutes the founding moment in the relationship of devotion and reliance of the people of Brognathia towards their patron saint, who took over this office from St. Catherine following the fortuitous discovery in 1721 of her image by a mason who was cleaning the church of crumbling plaster. Subsequent miracles attributed to the Marian picture (most notably the miracle of a polio sufferer and the rescue of an emigrant’s daughter in Chicago on August 27, 1937) further strengthened its cult, which finds in the church’s depiction of the “vedute” (li sbelaziuoni), repeated for several days during the novena of the September feast day, a participatory religious event that epitomizes a centuries-old affair of popular piety. Considered by the Brognaturo community as the story in images of its devotion, the “vedute” are a scenographic “machine” by means of which this sort of collective “autobiography” unfolds with a series of sequences of “graces received” that culminate in the apotheosis of the statue of Our Lady of Consolation, slowly elevated to heaven in a glittering jubilation of angelic figures. Characteristic of this festive period is the ritual, certainly an echo of ancient agrarian festivals, of the so-called focari, the bonfires that are set alight, on the Thursday night preceding the beginning of the novena, along the streets of the town and which become centers of gathering for the consumption of food. The sound of drums accompanies the focari until dawn, when a song dedicated to Our Lady of Consolation is sung before going to morning mass on Friday, the first day of the novena. Leaving aside religious traditions, in the parish church it is first of all worth mentioning an important 16th-century marble group of the Annunciation, originally intended for the church of the convent of the same name, the work of the Carrarese Giovan Battista Mazzolo (or Mazzola), active in Sicily and Calabria in the first half of the 16th century, for whom training in the workshop of Antonello Gagini in Messina has been hypothesized. In the same church there is a wooden sculpture of St. Joseph with Child and the Immaculate Conception (1873) by Michele Amato of Seria. Also from the convent of the Annunziata, of which some ruins have survived, recently partly recovered, is a statue of the archangel Gabriel. The visit to Brognaturo, however, is not exhausted in the space of the parish church, but can be usefully completed with a passage by the Tiani palace (a family of which traces also remain in a poetic poem by Bruno Pelaggi from Serbia), with its interesting entrance through an ashlar granite archway that leads into the inner courtyard. Pipe craftsmanship, which had its greatest exponent in Domenico Grenci, is another feather in the cap of this community.