A 115-year-old Italian festival took place in Niles for the first time on Labor Day weekend, attracting large and enthusiastic crowds and garnering praise.
The Maria Santissima Lauretana festival, which is part Catholic religious celebration and part full-fledged Italian-American festival, featured an old-fashioned tradition called the “Flight of the Angels,” as well as Italian food booths, a carnival and a full schedule of Italian-themed live music. It took place on Church Street and in Golf Mill Park, just south of Golf Mill Shopping Center.
The Maria Santissima Lauretana festival moved this year from Berwyn, where it has been held for more than 20 years, to Niles.
“The people of Berwyn were very gracious to us, but our members on the Northside complained it was too far, so we moved it back,” said Joe Camarda, president of the Maria Santissima Lauretana Society of Altavilla Milicia in Chicago, in an interview earlier this summer.
One tent set up as a shrine attracted a steady stream of worshippers, who knelt to pray in front of a sacred painting which legend says came from a pirate ship and washed up on the shore of Altavilla Milicia, a town in Sicily, 400 years ago.
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Tony Giacone of Niles, whose said his father came from that town, and many of his relatives in the Maria Santissima Lauretana Society were hoisting a large float containing the sacred painting inside an ornate housing, during a procession Sunday.
“I’m ecstatic about the fest coming to Niles,” he said. “We’re hoping it’s a mainstay here for the next 100 years.”
Paul Faso of Park Ridge and his brother Vince said they had traveled to Altavilla Milicia in Sicily to carry the religious float containing the sacred painting in the Maria Santissima Lauretana festival there, where it originated.
“The Virgin Mother had a mind of her own—whatever house she passed by, if she didn’t want to move, you couldn’t move her,” said Paul. “If she didn’t want to stay, she ran.”
Vince, of Hoffman Estates, added, “We didn’t believe our father [Francesco Faso of Carpentersville, who was born in the Sicilian town], when he told us this, but I gave it my all, and I couldn’t move it. Without being there, you couldn’t believe it, but it actually happened.”
Asked to what he attributed that, he replied, “Faith.”
On Sunday, they were helping carry the float to the scaffolding for the festival’s highlight, the Flight of the Angels ritual. There, on two platforms about 60 feet apart, the girls, wearing angel-like dresses, climbed up onto platforms well above the crowd, got fitted into harnesses and were “flown,” via a rope and pulley system, to meet in the center.
There, suspended from a rope above, with the sacred painting just below them, they spoke clearly into a microphone, chanting a prayer in Italian to the Madonna as the large crowd watched and snapped photos.
When the girls, Micaella Gennett, 9, wearing a blue angel dress and Maria Voight, 7, wearing a pink angel dress, had safely climbed back down from the platform, their parents were waiting for them. The girls are second cousins.
“She memorized it in two weeks and then they practiced the entire month of August,” said Daniella Gennett, Micaella’s mother.
The girls recited the prayers at the 5:30 p.m. flight, and a different pair, Concetta, 10, and Isabella, 9, Anemone, who are sisters, recited at the 8:30 p.m. flight.
Maria Camarda, the grandmother of one of the girls, said the elaborate dresses were made 37 years ago, and the girls playing the angels have been wearing them ever since.
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Maria’s husband Joe Camarda, president of the Maria Santissima Lauretana Society, said he was grateful to Niles officials for giving the festival a warm welcome. Like many others, he said the crowd had ballooned over previous years.
“I see so many people here today that I haven’t seen in 20 years,” he said. “The number of people is unbelievable.”
One of those in the crowd was Laurie Strzelecki, whose father, Tom Bondi, is a longtime Lauretana Society member and also a former Niles trustee who had suggested bringing the festival to Niles years ago. Because the temperature reached 90 degrees Sunday, she said he was unable to come due to his health.
Looking out at the crowd, she said, “This is my dad’s dream. He would have been beaming right now.”
Pam DeFiglio is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.