On 16 May 1910 Cardinal Pietro Maffi, Archbishop of Pisa, crowned the statue of the Madonna venerated on the hill of Arcola. Three days later, at twenty past three in the morning, an arson fire burned the church to the ground: the report left in the parish archive by Don Alessandro Centi records that the statue from the high altar and the white and blue tulle veil wrapped around it came out of the flames untouched. It is the most repeated episode in the story of a sanctuary founded three and a half centuries earlier, in 1556, when five sisters — Barbara, Camilla, Elisabetta, Catarinetta and Angela, daughters of Baldassarre Fiamberti and Margherita Blasio — said they had seen the Virgin above a rosemary bush at Carbonara while they were reciting the Angelus. Work began that same year and ended in 1558; soon afterwards the Republic of Genoa recognised Our Lady of the Angels as patron of Arcola.
What to see
Inside, three naves are divided by columns of the Ionic order. Below the presbytery a stair goes down to the Chapel of the Apparition, built on the spot the five sisters described. On the high altar stands the statue of the Virgin carved in 1624 by Battista Orsolini of Carrara; behind it, two frescoes painted by Luigi Agretti in 1911 tell the apparition to the girls and the coronation. The walls carry a great number of ex voto: small painted panels, photographs, objects left after a grace received, a sort of popular archive of the valley.
To the left of the high altar, the chapel of the Holy Rosary keeps a wooden statue by Pietro Gavè, made with the help of master Mario Cabano of Massa, and a canvas by Andrea Podenzana dated 1688. The Annunciation and The Cross and the Pious Women are by Giambattista Casoni, a seventeenth-century painter from La Spezia. The organ was built in 1799 by the Tronci firm of Pistoia.
Visiting
The sanctuary stands at the top of the hill of the old village, in via Giuseppe Garibaldi, reached on foot up the lanes of Arcola. From the terrace in front of the church the view falls on the plain where the Vara flows into the Magra. It is a working parish church of the Media Val di Magra vicariate, diocese of La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato: opening follows the times of services, and on weekdays you may well find the doors shut outside Mass. The busiest day is still the May feast, heir to the procession of 1854, when the people of Arcola, the magistrates and the confraternities carried the statue through the streets while cholera was killing thousands across Italy.
Our editors' tip
We suggest climbing up in late afternoon: the low light warms the stone of the facade and the plain below reads more clearly, with the ribbon of the two rivers. Before looking at the paintings, stop a few minutes in front of the ex voto: they are the most honest part of the sanctuary, and they tell of shipwrecks, illness and homecomings far better than any altarpiece.