Santuario della Madonna di Porto Salvo

In a rocky hollow on Lampedusa's western road, this cave sanctuary honours the island's patroness, the Madonna di Porto Salvo. Veneration here goes back to the first mass celebrated for the Bourbon settlers in 1843; today she is remembered on the 22nd of every month, and her feast on 22 September is the island's great day.

Why it matters

The Santuario della Madonna di Porto Salvo is the religious heart of Lampedusa, and the documentation behind it is unusually deep for so small a building. The Archdiocese of Agrigento's official directory records it as the rettoria Madonna di Porto Salvo at Via Madonna in the comune of Lampedusa e Linosa, within the vicariate of Porto Empedocle. The Madonna di Porto Salvo is the island's patroness, and her feast on 22 September is Lampedusa's principal celebration of the year.

The site's claimed antiquity is remarkable. A chronicle written in 1254 by an anonymous cleric travelling home with Louis IX of France after the Sixth Crusade describes, on this island, an ancient hermitage with two chambers, a vermilion cross painted on the floor and the remains of hermits inside. Historians of the Pelagie, notably Amilcare Fantoli, traced the cult of a Marian shrine in this sea-facing hollow back much further still, to the unsettled centuries of the early Middle Ages.

What to notice

The sanctuary is not a conventional church. It is a small worship space set into rock at the head of a shallow valley that opens to the sea between low cliffs, reached from the Strada di Ponente on the road that continues towards the Isola dei Conigli bay. The visitor sees a modest chapel-front, a flowering garden and a cluster of small caves that have given shelter here for centuries; the statue of the Virgin stands above the altar within. Tradition holds that in past centuries both Christians and Muslims climbed the vallone from their boats to pray and trade under a shared truce around this shrine, an unusual history of mutual tolerance for any Mediterranean island.

Inside, the present room is a single asymmetric chamber, the result of repeated rebuilding, most heavily after the Second World War. The palimpsest quality is the point of the visit: a medieval hermit's site, an early modern votive station for passing sailors, the Bourbon settlers' first church and the town's shrine rolled into one low cave. The sea view from the mouth of the valley explains the dedication: Porto Salvo means safe harbour, the Madonna under whose protection boats leave and return.

Context and history

The documented story is a chain of recoveries. A marble statue of the Madonna was commissioned in Malta in the eighteenth century by the merchant Mario Li Vati from a sculptor named Marco, and stood on the altar here until it was decapitated, probably in the late eighteenth century, in circumstances still debated. In 1812 the Gatt family, then leasing rights on the island, restored the building. When the Bourbons repopulated Lampedusa in the 1840s, the royal governor Bernardo Maria Sanvisente had the mutilated statue repaired, and on 22 September 1843 the first mass of the new colony was celebrated in the sanctuary, fixing the date of what remains the island's most important religious and civic festivity. From the late nineteenth century the image has been venerated as the Madonna di Porto Salvo and proclaimed patroness of Lampedusa.

Two anchorages give the site wider resonance. The Genoese captain Andrea Anfossi, landing here in the sixteenth century, took away a devotional painting whose fame produced the Ligurian sanctuary of 1619, so that Lampedusa's name survives in a shrine on the Italian mainland. And the island's parish still orbits the sanctuary: the priest of Lampedusa, don Carmelo Rizzo, serves the rettoria recorded at Via Madonna.