Chapel built in 1761 by the priest Don Nicola Reino. The celebrations in honor of the Crowned Madonna appear particularly interesting for the union between the sacred and the profane. Festival which is celebrated on the last Sunday of April in the rural locality of the same name, here the statue of the Virgin is carried in procession, which is watched over with songs and prayers in the days preceding the festival the farmers trace furrows in the earth which from the horizon they arrive at the little church, putting all their effort into ensuring that they are as straight as possible, and through competition between the various groups and out of devotion and thanksgiving for the harvest.
During the rite the farmers raised very high rods composed of wheat, grass and flowers at the top of which was placed the representation of the sanctuary or a box containing a dove which will be released at the end of the ceremony, a rite still kept alive thanks to many groups of young people who during the year prepare the rods covered with colorful crepe paper flowers which they carry on their shoulders following the procession and then raise them in front of the church in honor of the Madonna.
The festival is characterized by vigils, prayers and breakfasts consumed fleetingly on the grass surrounding the church or in the various kiosks set up for the occasion. The historical sources of the wheat festival are helpful in trying to follow all the stages of a phenomenon that over the years has been enriched with new meanings and adapted to new religious dictates. The origin of the ritual consisting in the offering of grain to the deities is lost in the mists of time and dates back to the cults linked to agricultural life in pagan times and to the sense of fear and insecurity linked to the precariousness of the return of the missing seed. In fact, the outcome of the harvest depends on superior forces that cannot be controlled by man, such as adverse weather conditions, so it is these that must be thanked if the harvest was plentiful and must be encouraged to be generous also the following year with donations and devotion.
The first historical information on the wheat festival in Campania dates back to the times of the Roman Empire when, in the month of August, agricultural work stopped and Ceres, goddess of the harvest, was thanked with offerings and dances on the threshing floors and propitiatory rites were held for the next harvest. Subsequently, with the advent of Christianity, carts loaded with wheat were brought as an offering to some Saint as a sign of devotion and gratitude for the harvest.
This ritual perhaps hides the questionable habit of the clergy who during the feudal era forced farmers to donate part of the harvest. In this period the first attempts to weave straw threads to create decorations were born. Even today, thanks for the harvest are dedicated to the Saints and Madonnas to whom the inhabitants of the various municipalities of Campania still linked to agricultural traditions are devoted; the Madonna del Carmine in San Marco dei Cavoti, the Crowned Madonna in San Bartolomeo in Galdo, the Assunta in Fontanarosa and the Addolorata in Mirabella Eclano, towns where the female divinities of the fields have been recovered in the Christian figure of the Madonna.
Translated by Google •
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