Pino Nano, the true story of Natuzza Evolo, the woman who lived the mystery of the stigmata during Holy Week

by Pino Nano

The life of the Calabrian seer in the story by Pino Nano, author for the RAI of dozens of TV Specials.

Natuzza Evolo was born in Paravati, a fraction of the municipality of Mileto, on 23 August 1924, but never had the good fortune to meet her father, Fortunato Evolo, who had meanwhile left Calabria for Argentina looking for work just a few months earlier. that she was born. The child grows up with her mother, Maria Angela Valente, and with her maternal grandparents, Antonino Valente and Giuseppina Rettura, but the conditions of the family are so poor that the child will have to adapt to living on the street, begging for a loaf of bread, and asking often alms. As the years go by, Natuzza has to stay more and more shut up at home, and when her mother was arrested for a theft of chickens and taken to prison, Natuzza had to shoulder the burden of being a mother to her younger siblings. Five in all. Domenico, Antonio, Francesco, Vincenzo, and Pasquale. They were born by her mother during the period when her father Fortunato Evolo was still in Argentina, therefore "nobody's children", but to whom Maria Angela Valente had nevertheless imposed the surname of her husband, Evolo, and that perhaps for this reason he did not never return to Calabria. All this, for Natuzza, will mean above all, having to stay at home and be a mother to her siblings, no kindergarten, no school, and no form of education, an intimate suffering that Natuzza will carry throughout her life. At the age of 12, his life changed radically. The girl is in fact hired as a maid in Mileto, in the house of the lawyer Silvio Colloca, and where Natuzza will remain until the day of her wedding, but where the girl also begins to show, and above all to tell, the first "extraordinary signs" of an existence and a physical status which, for the rest of her life, will make Natuzza Evolo the unwitting protagonist of the media world.

Francesco Mesiano, one of the first and most attentive scholars of Natuzza Evolo, recalls that from a very young age Natuzza showed particular signs: "she is a woman who sees the dead and converses with them, who goes into a trance, who has blood sweats, more evident during Lent, which also lives the great mystery of the stigmata. The blood that gushes from his wounds, in contact with bandages or handkerchiefs, turns into strange signs, sometimes incomprehensible, into prayer texts in various languages, in chalices, hosts, Madonnas, hearts, crowns of thorns. In short, we are in the presence of the most absolute mystery”. A real mystery, therefore, inexplicable and indecipherable, remained under the magnifying glass of scholars and men of the Church for more than 80 years, and which today, after his death, has remained as it is, this time well preserved and still under observation in the most remote archives of the Vatican where, due to a process of beatification, which has now begun, the “Natuzza Evolo” case is analyzed, vivisected and studied in all its thousand possible facets. At just eight years old · - writes the anthropologist Luigi Maria Lombardi Satriani in his masterpiece "The Bridge of San Giacomo", Viareggio Award 1989 - "Natuzza dreamed of San Francesco di Paola and asked him for a grace; the Saint assured her that "within three days" it would be heard. Grace consisted in being able to leave her maternal home; after three days she was called by a lawyer, in whose house, after about a month, she entered as a servant. “One evening - Natuzza herself said - after closing the door, as soon as I retired to my room, I saw people come in dressed like us, who told me they were souls from the other world. I was very afraid and ran away screaming ”. The lawyer Colloca with whom he worked then thought that Natuzza was "invaded by spirits". The next day she accompanied her to church, so that the parish priest would bless her, but when she returned home "a man came to me - Natuzza still remembered - and told me he was St. Thomas: he raised his hand to bless me and said:" Now I give you another blessing, from today on you will see the dead both day and night ”. As the years go by, his house, just outside Paravati, overlooking the provincial road that connects Mileto to Rosarno, soon becomes a destination for pilgrimages, sometimes even irrepressible and continuous. It was 1958 when, in the period of full Lent, the people of Paravati cried out for the first time to the miracle. For the first time, in fact, on the hands of "Tuzza", as the local people have called her for years, the stigmata appear. Since then, those scars will never heal again. Every year, punctually, during the week of Easter, her wounds reopen, start to bleed again, become more and more painful, first the holes in her hands, then in her feet, then again in her knees: For her these are days of great pain physical, and of great psychic prostration, and Holy Week is the saddest time of the year.