Festivities in Honor of Our Lady of the Snows

A devotion born from a miracle

The Festivities in Honor of Our Lady of the Snows are among the most deeply rooted traditions in the calendar of Bugnara, a village in the Peligna Valley in the province of L'Aquila, listed among the Most Beautiful Villages in Italy. Every year, on August 5th, the community gathers around its Madonna in a celebration that combines spirituality, tradition, and conviviality.

The cult of Our Lady of the Snows recalls the 4th-century Roman legend, when Pope Liberius is said to have commissioned a basilica on the Esquiline Hill at the site indicated by a miraculous August snowfall. In Bugnara, however, contemporary devotion is tied to a much more recent and cherished local memory: the miraculous rain of August 5, 1933, which arrived after a long and dramatic drought, when the inhabitants fervently invoked the protection of the Virgin.

Between ancient rites and rural culture

The festival preserves traces of a religiosity deeply intertwined with the agricultural world. Tradition recalls the ancient processional cavalcade, with horses, mules, and donkeys adorned with flowers and laden with sacks of grain, offered as a sign of gratitude for the harvest. Excavations near the church have also revealed Roman-era findings, including an inscription dedicated to a priestess of Ceres, confirming a millennial continuity between ancient agrarian cults and Marian devotion.

The festival program

The festivities open with the preparatory novena, celebrated from July 27 to August 4 at the Church of Our Lady of the Snows. The culminating day of August 5th alternates between moments of faith and civic events:

• Religious program: morning confessions, Holy Mass with exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, Holy Rosary, and, in the evening, the solemn Mass followed by the procession through the village streets.
• Civic program: the band's musical tour through the districts, the commemorative ceremony at the Monument to the Fallen, and, in the evening, the concert in Piazza Santissimo Rosario that brings the festival to a joyful close.
• Historical photo exhibition dedicated to Bugnara, set up in Borgo San Vittorino, which guides visitors through the village's memory.

An identity-defining event

Organized by the Bugnara Festival Committee with the support of the Municipality, the Our Lady of the Snows festival is much more than a religious recurrence: it is the moment when the entire Peligna community comes together, across different generations and citizens returning for the summer, to renew a bond that unites faith, land, and memory. An authentic opportunity to discover the soul of this corner of Abruzzo, at the foot of the Peligna Valley mountains.