Nostra Signora del Monte - Fonni

Perched on Monte Pasada above Fonni, Nostra Signora del Monte is a rural sanctuary set among holm oaks and cumbessias, with views toward the Gennargentu ridges.

Why it matters

The sanctuary stands on Monte Pasada at 1,253 metres above sea level. The site brings together a church built by shepherds, rows of pilgrim lodgings, a devotional path climbing through woods, and an annual feast that still mobilises the families of Fonni. Alberto Della Marmora, the nineteenth-century French general who surveyed the island, already described the church and the great crowds of its yearly festival in his itinerary of Sardinia. Since the early seventeenth century the sanctuary site has overlooked the pastures between the town and the Gennargentu, and it remains a stage of the island's pilgrimage network, the Via dei Santuari.

What to notice

The present building is deliberately plain: the original seventeenth-century temple was demolished in 1976 as unsafe and rebuilt in modern forms with money and volunteer masonry from the townspeople. The Via Crucis stations, donated by a prior of the confraternity, lead through the landscape; the nearby lookout opens over the crests of the Gennargentu, the Govossai lake basin and the plain of Pratobello. Two rows of cumbessias or muristenes, the dry-stone lodgings where novena pilgrims once slept, frame the open space in front of the church. Inside, devotion centres on the statue of the Madonna crowned in silver, purchased in 1630 to replace the earlier image; the first statue was noted for showing the Virgin pregnant, an unusually tender iconography for a rural sanctuary. Nearby nuraghe remains record an earlier period of settlement on the height.

Context and history

Work on the sanctuary began between 1602 and 1605 at the initiative of Emanuele Cedda, a Fonni landowner, with the help of local shepherds. The church was dedicated to the Madonna della Visitazione. For most of its life it was administered by lay families, who funded its expansion: Cedda's heirs enlarged the single-naved hall, with its two Gothic arches and juniper-beam roof, and acquired the 1630 statue. The Siccardi laws of the new Italian state put the church up to auction in 1867; after decades of dispute it was donated to the Bishop of Nuoro in 1931, together with five cumbessias and their loggiato, confirming the diocesan custody recorded for the twentieth century. Historically the community kept two feasts, a minor one in July and the great Sa Esta Manna on the first Sunday of September; the celebrations bring together novena devotion, procession and local traditions. The sanctuary is part of the Via dei Santuari, a devotional itinerary linking novenari from Cabras to Santa Teresa Gallura.