Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today we remember the presentation of the child Mary at the Temple in Jerusalem. The story isn’t in the canonical Gospels: it comes from the Protoevangelium of James, a second-century apocryphal text, and from the Book of the Nativity of Mary. They say that Anne and Joachim, who had her late in life after praying for her for a long time, had promised her to God, and that when she was three they brought her to the Temple and left her there. The feast was born in the East — the Byzantine rite calls it the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple — and reached the West much later, in the fourteenth century, after some resistance precisely because it rests on an apocryphal text. But there’s something else that falls today, and many people in Italy know it: November 21 is the feast of the Madonna della Salute in Venice. The city has celebrated it since 1631, when the plague that had killed a third of the Venetians came to an end: the basilica of Santa Maria della Salute was built as a vow, at the Dogana point, and every year a bridge of boats is set up across the Grand Canal so people can walk there. You go, you light a candle, and you eat castradina. It hasn’t stopped once in four centuries. The Smorfia puts the Madonna at number eight. If your name is Mary, today is your name day.