In the sultry summer light as in the winter mists, the village of Grazie exudes a particular charm. A poignant and humid landscape reminds us of what the countryside was. The Blessed Virgin of Grace, taken from a newsstand on the banks of the Mincio and placed to protect a sanctuary, still unfolds her cloak on the church square, where wandering artists, the “madonnari”, draw her effigy on the asphalt with colored chalks.
One of the places where the sacred resists is the sanctuary of Madonna delle Grazie near Mantua. The Lombard-Gothic façade, with its beautiful porch, overlooks a square with a strange charm: in winter, when the fog rises from the meadows, it seems to be at the crossroads of desolation; summer, on the other hand, is white and sultry, humid and ghostly. But when the sunset reddens the sky, and the reeds and waters shine with gold, the vague Virgilian sense of a campaign that generates life enters the bones. The village of Grazie then appears as a small chessboard of houses at the intersection of earth, water and sky.
Once you have passed the porch, you don't expect a world to open up where the sacred imposes a supernatural direction on history, which dominates nature over the course of days. A silent, distant, dusty story, which the interior of the sanctuary, unsettling at first glance, brings back to life. Outside the church, on the square, a car parks, a cell phone rings, an English girl photographs with an iPad: we are in the 21st century. Inside the church, one looks over the wooden scaffolding erected along the aisle to look for characters that are no longer, and that time has blocked in the guise of their time: life-size votive wearing lace ruffs, fringed shawls, flirty headphones, hand-painted skirts, straw hats, if they are women; and armor, halberds, spears, swordsmen, if they are men.
The disadvantaged of reality are the disadvantaged of the dream: those who have escaped the gallows or drowning have left their simulacrum here, as a perennial thank you to Santa Maria delle Grazie. He earned a few more years than an already hard life in itself in the macaronic land of Merlin Cocai. A gallery of miracles that, along the deck, gives the perception of another world, where the dusty dedications to the individual scenes refer to the power of faith.
The ex-vota statues seem to reach out to the spectator from the niches in which they are placed. The sculptures are the backdrop of a sixteenth-century and baroque theater of miracles. The wooden deck with double loggia was built in 1517 by Friar Francesco da Acquanegra to bring order to the many votive gifts accumulated over the years: hangers and chips of the miraculous, wooden figures, cloth and papier-mâché of illustrious pilgrims, devotees begging for grace or escaping mortal dangers, anatomical wax votive offerings: hands, eyes, breasts, pestiferous vultures, whose healing was sought by the faithful. There are noblewomen, but also a female figure with a straw hat, called, due to the resigned appearance, “the misery of Grazie”; there are the cardinal, soldiers in sixteenth-century clothes, the one saved from drowning, the one saved from hanging, the executioner; and garlands, baroque oddities, the wax used as Spanish decoration. The friars replaced the poor cloth coverings that were falling apart: one of them, Serafino da Legnago, is depicted in the ninth statue on the right from the entrance to the nave. Out of eighty niches, only 53 still contain their sculpture. All this suggests a Wunderkammer, one of those eclectic museums of the 16th and 17th centuries, where the objects were contained in wardrobes and shelves or hung on the walls and ceiling, like the crocodile found in the Mincio and stuffed: since the beginning of the fifteenth century, it has been hanging in the church, a symbol of the demon who flees before Madonna. In the main altar of 1646, the miraculous icon of Madonna delle Grazie adored by fishermen is inserted above the tabernacle, an anonymous 15th-century panel on poplar that mixes popular traits with Byzantine echoes. In the sacristy there are numerous votive tablets painted between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
The historic core of Grazie is represented by the sanctuary, begun in 1399 and consecrated in 1406, and by the buildings located on the perimeter of the square in front. The oldest part is that of the terraced houses in Via Madonna della Neve, in which you can still recognize the original cell that gave rise to the various types of buildings over time: fishermen's houses and houses that emerged from the closure of the porches that surrounded the square. Those on the right side of the building housed workshops and shelters for pilgrims.
The sanctuary, in a raised position on the Mincio reeds, has a façade facing the village, while the river flows behind it. Wanted by Francesco Gonzaga as an ex-vota for the end of the plague, in the past it was reached more often by boat than by land. The pilgrims who emerged from the reeds at dawn or arrived there on full moon nights filled their eyes with its rounded lines. The journey to the sanctuary represented the time of waiting: the stay inside it was the sacred time; the farewell was the time of hope. Let's leave the Spanish soldier wearing the helmet and the 16th century flower dress; we say goodbye to the pilgrim dressed in the Turkish style and the curly warrior wounded in the throat; let's say goodbye to the Misery of Grasie, the peasant woman in the straw hat who spun wool and cut the marsh reeds. The sorrows and misfortunes of living remain in there. Behind the sanctuary, descending from the hill on which it stands, the Po Valley Amazon opens up. We enter the myth: among the reeds, on an indolent summer day, we could see the god Pan who spies on river nymphs. We are in the kingdom of water, of the swamp: “where the Mincio disperses in slow and twisted turns/Orlando the banks of supple reeds,” Virgil wrote in Book III of the Georgics.
This vast wetland, covering more than 1450 hectares, reaches the outskirts of Mantua and is the Valli del Mincio Nature Reserve, one of the largest inland wetlands in Italy. At the height of the town of Grazie, the Mincio, which flows from Peschiera to the Po in a north-south direction, makes a sharp turn at a right angle in a west-east direction. Its course slows down to a swamp, due to the hydraulic works of the Pitentino in 1190. In the dense intertwining of channels opened over the centuries by men to access fishing and hunting areas, or to cultivate sedges and swamp rods, an almost exotic environment is revealed. The red heron nests among the ashen willow bushes, and the swamp falcon roams the thicket of the reeds. From the rods and branches extended above the water, the kingfisher plunges to catch the minnow. We glide by boat through the bends of a river that looks like the Mekong of the Salgarian imagination, especially in summer when you sail slowly among the lotus flowers. Summer is an explosion of colors: under the surface of the water, where it slows down until it almost stops, submerged vegetation grows; on the surface lie the floating leaves of the white water lily loved by Mallarmé or of the more common yellow water lily, the water lily that bewitched Monet and D'Annunzio. “The water lily - writes Gaston Bachelard - is an instant of the world... the surprising flower of a summer dawn.” And also, the marsh gentian, the buttercup of the reeds, the orchid: a whole plant world that lives in stagnant and remote waters. Then suddenly, at the bottom of the swamp, out of the meanders and reeds, here is the magnificent skyline of Mantua lying on Lake Superior: the towers, the domes, the castle, the Thousand and One Nights in the Po Valley.
Thank you is the kingdom of the ephemeral: a downpour is enough to erase the paintings from the church churchyard, just as the passage of time is enough to return to nothing the pinstripe canvas or the bamboo padding that cover the ex vota sculptures. Every August 15, a sacred pictorial representation takes place in the churchyard that attracts hundreds of tourists. On the night before the feast of Madonna, madonnari from all over the world draw images related to the sacred themes of the Christian tradition. The virtuosi of chalk leave a mark of the sacred in the place where it still survives.