 |
|
|
The Parish of Ghiaie di Bonate is situated in the Bergamo Diocese at about ten kilometres from the chief town. You can reach it from Milan or Brescia in about an hour's drive, leaving the A4 Motorway at Capriate tollgate and then steering for Ponte San Pietro. When you get to the Bonate Sopra roundabout, drive past the petrol station, turn right and drive towards the Ghiaie di Bonate. After a few bends along the village's road you get to the place of the 1944' apparitions where a remembrance chapel was built. Ghiaie di Bonate owes its name to the gravelly soil of the Brembo river. It is a hamlet of Bonate Sopra and, for a small portion, of Presezzo. Ghiaie di Bonate was established as a Parish, ecclesiastically speaking, since 1921 and was recognized civilly after much opposition on the 29th March 1944, at the eve of the apparitions. It is the only Parish of the Diocese dedicated to the Holy Family. Torchio (Winepress) is a sub-hamlet of the Ghiaie which comprehends a cluster of few houses spread near the Brembo river, between a tract of fields and a nursery of conifers, overlooked by the tableland of the Isola, which served as an amphitheatre for the huge crowds who flocked here during the apparitions. Indeed, from the 13th May to the 31st July 1944, more than 3 million pilgrims came to this small village of the Bergamasque province, real streams of people mostly walking or carried by other means of transport, putting their lives in jeopardy on account of the incessant bombardments and machine-gun fires. The Second World War was tearing Italy apart and leaving behind
death and destruction. The population lived in distress, deprived
of any kind of indispensable means of subsistence; the dream of
peace seemed still unobtainable. When everything seemed lost for
Italy and the world, when the Pope risked being transported to Germany,
hope revived by a miracle. In this hamlet, unknown to the world,
late in the afternoon of the 13th May 1944, Our Lady appeared to
a little girl of seven. Like she had done at Fatima on the 13th
May 1917 during the First World War, Our Lady chose the 13th of
May for sending the world, torn apart by the Second World War, her
messages of hope and peace again. |
|
 |
|
|
 
|
|
|
|
|
|