Genazzano

Genazzano has 5,959 inhabitants on a narrow tuff spur between two watercourses, in a position that allowed the Colonna, from their castle, to control the road between Rome and Naples. The town's coat of arms, however, recalls something quite different: the Disfida di Barletta of 1503, thirteen Italian knights against thirteen French, because one of the thirteen, Giovanni Brancaleone, came from here. In the second half of the nineteenth century the council put thirteen light-blue triangles in the shield, one for each knight, and every year the challenge is still re-enacted.

The finest story, though, belongs to the sanctuary. Tradition tells that in 1467 an elderly Augustinian tertiary, Petruccia di Ienco, spent everything she owned to put a ruined church back on its feet; when the money ran out her neighbours began to mock her, and she answered that before she died the Madonna and Saint Augustine would finish the work. That same year, while the Turks were besieging Scutari in Albania, a fresco of the Madonna and Child is said to have detached itself from a wall down there and to have arrived at Genazzano on the twenty-fifth of April, settling on the unfinished church. Pope Paul II sent two bishops to look into it, and nothing survives of their report: what survives is the bill. The Vatican account books record that on their return from the journey to "Janazzano" they were reimbursed twenty-two florins and sixty bolognini. The image is still there, and in 2025 pope Leo XIV, elected two days earlier and an Augustinian himself, chose this very sanctuary for his first journey outside the Vatican.