On 10 July 1647 a boy from Ponzano Superiore, Giovanni Battistini, came back to the village saying he had seen the Madonna and Child on the Castiglioni knoll. He convinced his family, the parish priest and his neighbours; within days people were already speaking of healings, and the knoll became a place of pilgrimage. On 9 December of the same year Francesco Agnini, bishop of Luni-Sarzana and Brugnato, signed the decree raising the site to a parish church dedicated to Bartholomew the Apostle. Locally, though, everyone still calls it the Madonnetta.
What to see
The building tells the story of its own growth by addition. The first stone was blessed by the bishop on 24 August 1648; in 1654 the entrance nave was widened and the dome added, and in that same year it was decided to commemorate the apparition on the fourth Sunday of July, a date the community still keeps. In 1670 came the presbytery. Three building campaigns in little more than twenty years: today's sanctuary is the sum of those three decisions.
The piece worth the climb is a Madonna and Child by Domenico Beccafumi, displayed inside: a major Sienese name of the sixteenth century in a hamlet church of the Lunigiana, one of those coincidences that make Italy's minor heritage worth chasing. Even before you go in, the wayside shrine on the Cisa state road, at the turning for the sanctuary, carries an inscription announcing the place to anyone driving along the valley floor.
Visiting
The sanctuary stands on piazza Chiesa, in the hamlet of Ponzano Magra, on the slope facing the valley: from the Cisa state road you take the turning marked by the shrine and drive up. It is the seat of the parish of San Bartolomeo apostolo, Sarzana vicariate, diocese of La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato: a working church rather than a museum, so opening hours follow the services, and the busiest day of the year is still the fourth Sunday of July.
Our editors' tip
If you can choose your date, choose the fourth Sunday of July: it is the feast fixed in 1654 and still the moment when the hamlet recognises itself in this place. Failing that, look for a date with the Corale San Bartolomeo, the parish choir founded in 1976, which has added gospel and spirituals to its liturgical repertoire; hearing the Madonnetta full of voices is worth more than any tour of an empty church.