The Ghiaie di Bonate apparitions: Adelaide Roncalli's visions of the "Queen of the Family" and the whirling sun over Bergamo

Spring 1944. Northern Italy was under German occupation and the Italian Social Republic, the Fascist puppet state. The Allied bombing campaign was under way.

In the hamlet of Ghiaie, in Bonate Sopra near Bergamo, Adelaide Roncalli was seven years old. On 13 May she was picking daisies with three other children at a spot called il Torchio.

Only Adelaide saw it. A luminous point came down from above and grew larger. It became the Madonna holding the Child, with St Joseph beside her, all enveloped by three ovals of light. The Lady wore a white dress and a blue mantle, carried a rosary, and had two white roses at her feet. Her words were simple: "Do not run away, as I am the Virgin Mary!"

There were thirteen visions in all, in two cycles. The first ran from 13 to 21 May, the second from 28 to 31 May. Most came around six in the evening. On 21 May Adelaide saw the Holy Family inside a church with four animals at prayer. A brown horse left, trampled a field of lilies, and St Joseph brought it back "with a gentle reproving look."

By devotional counts the crowd reached about 200,000 on 21 May and about 350,000 on the last day. They never saw the figures. They watched the sky.

Dr. Eliana Maggi, a physician, later swore to what she saw on 20 May: "a cross-shaped rift in the sky and a kind of rain of golden and silver dots (little stars) for a minute or two." On 21 May witnesses said the sun "whirled dizzily on itself projecting beams of yellow, green, red, blue, violet light in all directions." The Tavernola parish journal agreed. "The sun looked green, then bright red, then gold yellow." Bishop Adriano Bernareggi noted in his war diary that a crowd had stayed outside "because they said they had observed strange phenomena in the sun."

Don Luigi Cortesi, a Bergamo seminary teacher, joined the case on 19 May with the bishop's permission. He began as an enthusiast but ended convinced that "the seer had seen nothing." Devotional sources say Adelaide was kept apart from her family for months at an Ursuline convent. On 15 September 1945 she signed a retraction, but on 12 July 1946 she withdrew it before seven witnesses: "It is true that I saw Our Lady. I formerly said I did not see because Don Cortesi dictated this to me."

Fr. Agostino Gemelli, the Franciscan psychologist, examined her and ruled out mental illness, hysteria and suggestion. Prof. Ferdinando Cazzamalli, present on 31 May, accepted the experiences as real but explained them as telepathic, not supernatural. Nazi and Fascist authorities had reportedly called the whole affair a hoax set up by Allied intelligence. In 1948 Bishop Bernareggi gave his verdict: "Non consta della soprannaturalità." The supernatural character was not established. Devotion was banned.

Adelaide became a nurse, married and lived in Milan. In a statement filed with a Milan notary in 1989, she said: "I am absolutely persuaded of having had the Apparitions." She died on 24 August 2014, aged 77. In 2019 Bishop Francesco Beschi authorised devotion to Maria Regina della Famiglia, excluding "any reference to messages and apparitions." To its pilgrims, Ghiaie remains the Italian Fátima.