OUR LADY OF STECCATA

Day 288: February 24

Our Lady of Steccata, Parma, Italy

On the site of the current church of the Steccata there was an oratory built since 1392 to house a venerated image of St John the Baptist painted in fresco on the external wall of a house in St Barnabas Street (today Via Garibaldi): the building then became the seat of a Confraternity dedicated to the Virgin Annunciation and aimed at distributing marriage dowries for poor, unmarried girls without paternal protection.

Towards the end of the fourteenth century on the façade of the oratory was painted the picture of Our Lady, which soon became the object of particular devotion by the people of Parma; from the fact that the area of the building was protected by a fence, perhaps built precisely to regulate the influx of numerous pilgrims, that Virgin began to be invoked with the title of Our Lady of Steccata.

To better preserve the precious image, in 1521 the members decided to have a grandiose sanctuary built. On 4 April 1521 the bishop of Lodi Nicolò Urbani laid the first stone of the building: the work was entrusted to the architects Bernardino and Giovan Francesco Zaccagni da Torrechiara, who had already directed the construction site of the abbey church of San Giovanni, and from 1525 continued under the supervision of Gian Francesco d'Agrate.

The dome was built between 1526 and 1527 by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who had been sent to Parma by Pope Clement VII for some military architecture works. The church was consecrated on February 24, 1539 by Cardinal Gian Maria Ciocchi del Monte, papal legate in Parma and Piacenza.

The building is set on a Greek cross plan, with arms placed on the cardinal axes and closed by four large symmetrical apses, and between the arms there are four quadrangular chapels that have always been intended for worship.

It is difficult to establish who is responsible for the detailed authorship of the church project, whose layout recalls the solution conceived by Bramante for St Peter's in the Vatican; Vasari, in the Lives, states that it was made, "as they say, with Bramante's design and order." The central dome by Sangallo is instead of clear Roman derivation.

The plan is reminiscent of the church of the Consolation in Todi, also due to the lack of a bell tower, however there are numerous differences: between the arches of the cross and the apses there are sections of barrel vaults while on the outside of the corners of the cross there are chapels; from this it can be deduced that the thrusts do not convey to the external walls of the building, as is the case in Todi.

In 1813, the ashes of Ottavio Farnese were moved to Steccata, after the demolition of the church of San Pietro Martire, commissioned by Ferdinand of Bourbon to enlarge the Palazzo della Pilotta. In 1823, at the behest of Marie Louise of Austria, a crypt was built to preserve the tombs of the dukes and princes of the Farnese and Bourbon-Parma houses (the ashes were transferred from the church of Santa Maria del Tempio). In 1851 the group with the Pietà by Tommaso Bandini, dedicated to the memory of Marie Louise, was placed near the entrance of the church. In 1905 the funeral monument to Adam of Neipperg, morganatic husband of the duchess, made by Lorenzo Bartolini in 1831 for the church of San Ludovico, was also moved there.

St Justin Russolillo Writes...

"Not only before your very eyes, not only through our hands, but in your heart, O Mother of Unbearable Sorrows, there was the Supreme Oblation, the Consummation of the Sacrifice, the Death of Jesus Christ."

(Justin Russolillo, Spirit of Prayer, trans. Louis Caputo, Vocationist Fathers, Newark, 1996, p. 158)