According to tradition, in the year 358, a wealthy Roman couple without children asked the Virgin Mary to show them how to dedicate their inheritance to God.
That night, the Virgin appeared to the couple and Pope Liberius in a dream. She told them to build a church wherever snow would fall. On August 5th, a miraculous snowfall covered the Esquiline Hill in Rome, the site where one of the four major basilicas now stands.
Since then, every August 5th, the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows is celebrated here with a solemn Mass and a reenactment of the miraculous snowfall.
A shower of white petals falls from the top of the basilica, recalling how, in the middle of Rome’s hot summer, a great snowfall occurred.
Many tourists witness it for the first time:
I didn´t know about the history of the Bascilica and I'm feeling something different because it´s a history, a beautiful history. With the snow. It´s the place when the Virgin Mary manifested.
It's a story that renews the faith of many, and each year it brings back the white petals to represent the snow that the Virgin sent as a miracle.
BAM
Trans. CRT
