According to an ancient tradition, which traced back to a XIII century manuscript, over the mountains there was a small village of Etruscan origins: Albereto.
When the Rotary’s barbarian hordes came closer, in 641, the villagers escaped toward the sea and concealed a Madonna’s statue underground in the small valley underneath the existing Sanctuary, in the “Fontanelle” place.
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Fast a century later, the seventh of July 740, a Monterosso’s priest, who was hunting, walking at dawn by that place, saw a white dove which, flapping around a run-down shack, disappeared underground. Intrigued, digged in there: but he found a heavy sandstone slab that he couldn’t move. |
The day after he brings there three laborers who kept digging with shovels, as a sweet smell wafted all around. A statue of Maria appeared before their eyes; a wooden sculpture representing the Madonna with her dead son in her arms. That priest would like to bring it at home, but he can’t move it. The day after a lot of people flocked, but the statue wasn’t there anymore. After painstaking researches they find it more aloft, off at “shouting distance”, on top of a chestnut tree. They bring it back to the place of the discovery. The day after they find it again over there on the chestnut, and this way for a few times; then they understand that it is over there, next to the chestnut, the place chosen by the Madonna to be worshiped.
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Pretty soon they build a chapel that will be expanded in time. Today, on the place of the discovery there is a sixteenth-century hexagonal chapel, called of Saint Mary Magdalene or of The Discovery. In 1974 the Madonna of Soviore has been proclaimed primary patron of the diocese of Spezia, Sarzana and Brugnato. |
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