Gallinaro

Gallinaro stands on a hill of the Valle di Comino, at five hundred and fifty-eight metres, and is named for the first time in 1023: it had probably been built by the count of Sora, and in 1067 it passed to the count of Aquino. In the twelfth century the sanctuary of San Gerardo arose there, in memory of the saint, and it grew with the pilgrimages, with the hermits who stopped there and with the devotional foundations of the Gerardis family, until the recognition of the relics in 1685; today it has three naves and an eighteenth-century front, and the saint is celebrated on 10 and 11 August. The village, though, is also a crossroads of another cult: the pilgrims who climb to the black Madonna of Canneto, in the nearby territory of Settefrati, have always met here, coming from Lazio, from Abruzzo and from Molise.

In modern times two things happened that have stayed with the village. The first concerns emigration: after unification many people of Gallinaro left, above all for France, and some of them ended up posing as models for Auguste Rodin. The second begins on 13 June 1947, when a girl, Giuseppina Norcia, said she had seen the Child Jesus. In 1975, in the countryside of via Fonte, a little church dedicated to the Child was raised, and around the apparition a religious movement grew, supported in its first years by monsignor Ernesto Cardarelli. Over time, between declared healings and further «divine revelations», the movement came into open conflict with the bishop and with the curia: on 4 October 2015 it declared itself autonomous, founding the Universal Christian Church of the New Jerusalem, with a pontiff elected by the assembly of the faithful, Samuele Morcia; in June 2016 pope Francis recognised those faithful as no longer in communion with the Catholic Church.