Saint Rosalia is not just one

She is a woman, she is a saint. She is the patron saint of Palermo, but that is not all. For four hundred years, Rosalia has been the hope of a people, she is the symbol of female independence, and she is the lifeline of Sicilians and migrants. In their thousands, on the night of every September 4, they walk the rugged path that climbs from the city to the summit of Monte Pellegrino, which is the hill that dominates the Conca d’oro. They do so to pay homage to the remains of a girl who, according to tradition, lived nine centuries ago as a hermit, in those very woods, and who is now venerated as an icon of freedom, redemption and non-conformism. A saint who for four hundred years has held together in Palermo the piazza and the sumptuous terraces, the street food and the precious chalices, the people and the aristocracy, the religious and civil authorities. A saint who refused marriage and chose her own destiny, and who for this reason has become an icon of the fight against violence against women, whether that be physical or psychological.

This violence is not a scourge solely in Palermo, but the summer of last year, a week before the feast of Santa Rosalia, with the city already dressed in light, experienced another terrible station in a seemingly endless via crucis. This time it was the gang rape of a 19-year-old girl in an abandoned construction site at the Foro Italico, which is a large green area on the seafront that has not yet been fully restored.

In the wake of the shock of that attack, the artist Igor Scalisi Palminteri, who is the author of numerous murals in Palermo celebrating popular icons - from the migrant saint Benedetto the Moor to the Franciscan “angel of the lowly” Biagio Conte, to Pio La Torre, the secretary of the Italian Communist Party killed by the Mafia - has in recent months created an enormous painting depicting Santa Rosalia. He has done so in the heart of a difficult district like Sperone, where the school and parish wage a daily struggle to snatch the children from a destiny of degradation and crime.

“The meaning I gave my Santa Rosalia allo Sperone painting,” he explained, “is that of a woman who lives freely, who thinks freely, who dresses freely, who acts freely, in a society that instead imprisons her in the cage of stereotypes. In Rosalia Sinibaldi’s breath of freedom, expressed in her determination not to accept the marriage her father wanted to force her into, fleeing that imposition, every girl should mirror herself. But also every boy”.

Therefore, the year in which we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Feast dedicated to her (the first was in 1624) is an opportunity to retrace a story that speaks to us today. A story read in different ways by the Church of the 17th century and that of today, by historians and anthropologists, by those who see in her the saint to whom to ask for a grace and by those who in her earthly parable secularly see the value of rebellion against male power. Rosalie is one, in short, but the Rosalies who speak to our society today are innumerable. Which shows that she is a figure of still extraordinary strength.

The story - the official one, revised and corrected when Rosalia, in 1624, became the liberator of Palermo from the plague - begins almost nine hundred years ago, in 1128. If it were a film, the first scene would show a large window of Palermo’s royal palace. There, to King Roger II and his wife Elvira of Castile, who are watching the sunset, an angel appears, addressing the Norman sovereign and says, “Roger, I announce to you that by God’s will a rose without thorns will be born in the house of Sinibaldo, your kinsman”.

Two years later, in 1130, the prophecy took the form of a little girl called Rosalie. Linguists explain that the name Rosalia actually has a Germanic etymology, which evokes the meaning of shield and glory, but it is known that people read what they want into words, and in “Rosalia” the pious have always seen a rose and a lily, passion and purity.

Little Rosalia, King Roger’s niece on her mother’s side, grew up in the house of Count Sinibaldo Sinibaldi, the lord of Monte delle Rose and Quisquina, and a member of the Berardi family that boasts direct lineage from Charlemagne. As a little girl, she could count on all the comforts that the era guaranteed to aristocrats. For example, she played in the royal court or in her father’s villa at Olivella, and was educated as befitted a girl of noble birth. At the age of 19 she was chosen to be maid of honour to Queen Sibylla of Burgundy, Roger II’s second wife.

It matters little whether the hagiography is the result of an invention, a Latin word that indicates both inventio - the finding of his remains at Monte Pellegrino - and the fanciful construction of a story constructed at a desk, which interweaves her noble origins with her kinship with sovereigns, her hermitage and her passage. A necessary construction to make the upper classes accept an ancient cult venerated by the lower social classes. What is important is that this cult, rather than losing strength, to become rigid in the folkloric stereotype, is enriched every year with new meanings and welcomes new requests, new hopes, new prayers for victory over new plagues.

A saint born to pacify, to heal society’s wounds, to mend a community torn apart first by the plague and then by mid-century insurrections in the Kingdom of Spain, of which Sicily was a part. An ecumenical saint who today, as then, speaks to everyone. Rosalia is the saint of the people of Palermo from all social backgrounds, the saint of the immigrants who stayed in the city, the saint of the Sicilian emigrants scattered throughout the world. The saint of women rebelling against a written destiny. The saint of women who suffer violence.

Rosalia had all the good fortune. In fact, almost all of them. She did not have the freedom to fall in love with an ordinary boy, which, in the 18th century, could not even be contemplated. Least of all for a daughter of an aristocratic family. Her father, in fact, had promised her to a Count like himself, whose name was Baldwin and had a special claim on the king. It is said that the count had saved his life during a hunt, when he was attacked by a wild animal, it might have even been a lion. This credit he decides to collect when he asked him for his niece Rosalie’s hand. The fate therefore seems sealed, for the young Sinibaldi. Who instead took the freedom to choose. The legendary story of the future saint recounts that the day before her wedding to Baldwin, upon looking in the mirror, she saw the image of Jesus reflected instead of her own. This was a sign that marriage was not to be. Rosalie cuts off her blonde braids and announced her decision. She will lead a monastic life.

Her parents and her betrothed do not take this news well. So much so in fact that in the following months they visited her continually in the monastery where she had moved to, which was then the present church of the Santissimo Salvatore, near Palermo’s Quattro Canti. This church was at that time dedicated - ironically - to the four patron saints that Rosalia will oust to become the devotion of the people of Palermo: Agata, Cristina, Ninfa and Oliva. They visit her and try to make her change her mind, to induce her to abandon her habit and veil. However, there is nothing that can be done. The girl has made up her mind to become a hermit.

After several stages and years of prayer in caves and the Sicilian countryside, the final stage of her hermitage was at Monte Pellegrino, which was a sacred mountain in Palermo even in pre-Christian times. It was here that the future saint ended her earthly existence, aged just 40, on September 4, 1170. Soon after, as the narrative of her ascetic life, of her renunciation of earthly comforts, passed from mouth to mouth, Rosalie became a saint by popular rumor.

What was to happen in the 17th century, around the virgin saint, is even more legendary than her origins. In 1624, Palermo was afflicted by a deadly plague epidemic, which claimed the lives of ten thousand people. All remedies were in vain. On May 26, a woman, who was also named Rosalia fulfilled a vow that she had made at the hospital and climbed Monte Pellegrino. Here she fell asleep next to a grotto. Our Lady appears to her in a dream and indicates a spot in that cave in which to dig, because there she will find “a treasure”, “a saint”. A few weeks later, the excavations began, to the scepticism of most. And some remains were indeed found. The date was July 15, the day that was to become the highlight of the patron saint’s feast.

However, these bones puzzled Cardinal Giannettino Doria. The first experts he summoned claimed they belonged to three different people, all of whom were men. So, it would not be those remains that would drive away the pestilence. The people, however, insisted, invoking a miracle to release them from the nightmare. They cling to another prodigious event, yet another in this centuries-old history. Vincenzo Bonelli, a “saponaro” who climbed Mount Pellegrino to commit suicide after his wife’s death, recounted that Rosalia appeared to him, dissuaded him from the extreme gesture, advised him to reassure the archbishop about the authenticity of the remains found there and to urge him to take them on procession.

Cardinal Doria then appointed another commission of experts, which on February 11, 1625 gave a verdict that contradicted the previous one. They found that the bones belonged to just one person, and moreover to a woman. The conclusion was clear: they were the “holy” remains of Rosalie. On June 9, the people of Palermo paraded behind the urn they hope will be miraculous. Meanwhile, the disease had slowly loosened its grip. On July 15, the anniversary of the finding, a crowd made a pilgrimage to the saint’s grotto, and the plague bulletin for the day reported, for the first time, zero cases. There was enough to acclaim the “Santuzza” the patron saint of the people of Palermo. Today, four hundred years later they are still hoping for her help, as well as the miracle of goodwill, to free themselves from further plagues. On the evening of July 14, the evening of the patron saint’s “Festino”, Archbishop Corrado Lorefice pointed out the rampant use of the chemical drug, crack, which is annihilating so many young people. “To whom,” he thundered, “do we want to leave our city, our neighborhoods, our homes, our streets? To this new plague that before our eyes, disguised as normality and unavoidability, is infecting our young people, that is, our children and grandchildren?”

From a corner of the suburbs to the summit of her mountain, from the popular festival in her name to the nocturnal pilgrimage that brings Palermitani and Sri Lankan immigrants together, that courageous and determined young woman continues to tell us something important. And she can lend a hand, to Christians and lay people alike, to drive away the new plagues.

by Laura Anello
Journalist, and President of the Foundation Le Vie dei Tesori