For eight months of the year the church up here is without its statue. The wooden Virgin and Child, probably 19th-century work, is carried up to the sanctuary on the first weekend of June and back down on the second weekend of September, on men's shoulders, along the 18 kilometres that separate it from San Severino Lucano. The sanctuary of Maria Santissima del Pollino stands at 1537 metres, in the hamlet of Mezzana, on a rock spur sheer above the Frido valley. The oral versions of its origins contradict one another, except on a single point: in the early 18th century the Madonna is said to have appeared to shepherds on the Pollino.
What to see
The account written down by the parish priests Prospero Cirigliano in 1929 and Camillo Perrone in 1966 tells of two sisters-in-law, Rosa Maria and Vittoria, who climbed the mountain after the apparition. Thirsty on the way up, they asked the Madonna for help and shortly afterwards saw water spring out beside the mouth of a cave; inside, buried under earth and stones, they found a chest holding a statue of the Virgin and Child wrapped in a cloth, probably of eastern or Byzantine workmanship. When they got home, Rosa Maria's husband, incurably ill, had been healed. Another version speaks instead of a shepherd girl and a letter for the clergy; a third, told at Terranova di Pollino, of shepherds who met at the cave to share out the pastures.
The main building is a three-aisled church in a barely Romanesque idiom, flanked by the pilgrims' house and the lodgings of the diocesan staff. The venerated statue shows the crowned Virgin in an old-rose tunic and gold mantle: a crimson rose in her right hand, in her left the crowned Child holding the globus cruciger, with two putti closing the group. The cloak on which the faithful used to pin offerings of money and jewellery was removed in a much-contested restoration. A short way off, since 2009, a bronze Madonna about 2.2 metres tall lifts the Child towards the valley: it was modelled by the Dutch sculptor Daphné Du Barry.
Visiting
You get here by car: the road dates from 1975 and took the place of the old mule track. The thing to know before setting out is that the wooden statue is kept in the church only from June to September. Three moments mark the year: the ascent, on the first weekend of June, with Sunday mass at 6:00 and arrival at the sanctuary in the afternoon; the devotional feast, on the first Friday, Saturday and Sunday of July; and the descent, on the weekend of the second week of September.
Our editors' tip
If you go up with the June procession, keep an eye on the women carrying the cinte balanced on their heads, the bundles of cereal stalks and candles that count as ex-votos here: when the musicians invite them to dance the tarantella, you are watching the same rite the anthropologist Annabella Rossi recorded in full in 1968. And before going in, look for the maple with the half-hollow trunk a few metres to the left of the façade; they say it is a thousand years old.