Santa Maria della Scala
A shrine and house of nuns in a valley in the hills outside Messina, whose image of the Virgin the people of Messina carried into the city in 1347.
Today: the hills outside Messina, Sicily, Italy
The Plague Comes to Messina and Catania
Anonymous of Catania, Sicilian History, printed in Rosario Gregorio’s Bibliotheca scriptorum (1791) · after April 1348 (events of October 1347 to April 1348)
Messanenses vero de hujusmodi mira visione territi, miro modo sunt universaliter effecti timidi. Quapropter ad beatam Virginem de Scalis per miliaria sex a civitate Messane distantem, scalciatis pedibus, cum processione Sacerdotali, comuniter ambulare statuerunt.
The people of Messina were terrified by this strange sight, and fear gripped them all. So they decided to walk together barefoot, in a procession led by priests, to the blessed Virgin of the Scala, six miles from the city.