Maropati

On 3 January 1971, in a house in the old centre of Maropati, somebody saw a picture of the Madonna del Rosario of Pompei weeping blood. The news spread quickly and a considerable flow of visitors followed, arriving from many other places. The Church, however, did not follow the pilgrims: on 16 September 1980, nine years later, the bishop of the diocese of Oppido Mamertina, monsignor Santo Bergamo, made public the conclusions of the commission of inquiry, according to which the events «do not contain elements such as to affirm supernaturality»; priests were forbidden to organise celebrations, processions or pilgrimages connected with the so-called lacrimation. It is an episode worth telling in full, because it shows how the Church, when it investigates its own devotions, is also able to say no.

That devotion, for that matter, was already at home here: in the mother church of San Giorgio Martire there is a small wooden altar with cherubs which holds precisely an image of the Madonna of Pompei, the work of Vincenzo Morani, who also made the stuccoes in the same church. In the same building there is a wooden statue of the Madonna del Rosario carved by Fortunato Morani of Polistena, born in 1828: it has been repainted so many times that the author's name, which was under the base, has disappeared. The other church of the village, Santa Lucia, is attested from the sixteenth century. The name of Maropati too has had a moving life: in the documents it appears as Maro-patre in 1636, Maropulli and Maropudi in 1664, Magropiti in 1696, Maropati between 1691 and 1697 and again Maropatre in 1720 — five different spellings in less than a century, depending on who was holding the pen. The communal arms, on the other hand, were drawn from the civic seal of 1810 kept in the state archive of Reggio Calabria.