The Madonna of the Bocco: Angela Volpini's Apparitions at Casanova Staffora

Postwar Italy. 1947. Casanova Staffora was a small village in the Oltrepò Pavese, in the province of Pavia. A few hundred metres away lay Il Bocco, a wooded hillside pasture. Angela Volpini, seven, from a farming family, minded cows there with other children.

June 4, 1947. About 4 p.m. Angela felt herself embraced from behind and lifted up. She turned, sure she would be face to face with her aunt.

Instead she saw "un volto luminoso, sconosciuto, bellissimo." A luminous, unknown, very beautiful face. The woman took her in her arms and kissed her hair. The figure had a human body. Yet, Angela said, she contained all of creation.

The other children saw no woman. They saw Angela lifted into the air, unconscious, and ran home saying she had died in the air. The message Angela brought back was simple. "I have come to teach you the way to happiness on this earth."

On July 4 the figure identified herself as Mary. The apparitions continued, usually on the 4th of each month, about 80 in all, until June 4, 1956. Angela offered flowers to the invisible Virgin and carried the invisible Christ child in her arms. Pilgrims claimed to see the Virgin's footprints pressed into the flowers.

The crowds grew. By autumn 1947 they came in their thousands. La Provincia Pavese put them at about 300,000 in March 1948. On October 4, 1947, and again on November 4, 1950, solar prodigies were reported and compared to Fátima. Ernesto Querciolli, later mayor of Varzi, recalled that as a young spectator he saw the sun move.

One message cut two ways. "Be good, pray, and I will be the salvation of your town." The Italian word paese also means country. With a general election set for April 18, 1948, partisans exploited the ambiguity. On March 4, 1948, the Bocco was militarised.

The Diocese of Tortona opened an inquiry in late 1947. Angela was questioned and examined at a convent in Voghera, then at Villa Meardi. By her own account she was held for about forty days in a windowless room. A commission of theologians and psychiatrists found her mentally sound and acting in good faith. In 1952 Bishop Egisto Domenico Melchiori could not authenticate the apparitions, but did not rule out a supernatural origin. The bishops suggested her First Communion and the Fátima story may have triggered the visions.

Giorgio Bocca, then a young reporter, called it a "faccenda truffaldina." A swindle. He said a relative of the girl put reporters in the front row to boost the trade in little Madonnas and candles. Gianni Baget Bozzo, a supporter, compared her to Bernadette at Lourdes. Later the case surfaced in UFO catalogues. Albert Rosales linked it to a supposed UFO crash on June 4, 1947. Patrick Gross, in URECAT, classed the case as "Invention, not UFO-related," suggesting Rosales had confused the date with Roswell.

On April 9, 1958, Pius XII received Angela in audience. The Nova Cana movement was founded that year. A church on the Bocco was inaugurated on June 4, 1962. In 1963 Angela took Pier Paolo Pasolini to the Eremo di Sant'Alberto di Butrio as he prepared Il Vangelo secondo Matteo. Massimo Arvat's 2019 documentary Il cielo è sulla terra revisited her story. The Church has never given a definitive judgment. Mass is still celebrated at the Bocco each month.