Religion | From London to La Costa (and Lucca and Beyond) Part Three

Yesterday I visited Lucca’s Santa Zita clinic with its sweet garden.

The ‘Casa di Cura’ Santa Zita was opened in Lucca in 1955 by an association composed mainly of doctors. Since 1958 it has been managed by the Oblate Sisters of the Holy Spirit. Their Religious Congregation was founded in 1882 by Elena Guerra, born and raised in Lucca. Like the other main clinic in Lucca, the Barbantine, it works closely with the Italian national health system.

Lucca boasts many saintly women (and some less so like Lucida Mansi!) Of the saintly there are three who are particularly venerated. They are

Santa Zita. See https://longoio3.com/2022/04/28/zita-zita-zita/

Beata Elena Guerra

Santa Gemma Galgani. See https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/saint-gemma-galgani-mystic-saint-or-mental-patient/

I’ve written about the two saints in other posts but said nothing about Elena so far.

Maria Elena Antonietta Guerra was one of the six children of Antonio Guerra and Faustina Franceschi, a wealthy and pious aristocratic married couple from Lucca. Only three children reached adulthood. Elena Guerra, after time spent in assisting the sick, decided to dedicate herself to a more intense religious life.

In 1882 she founded a lay female community in Lucca dedicated to the education of girls and to Santa Zita, patron saint of the city. It was a community without vows, a fellowship of volunteers dedicated to teaching. Gemma Galgani was also among her students.

The spread of spiritualist practices in those years and the anticlericalism of the Italian State pushed Guerra to publish several booklets and convinced her to turn directly to Pope Leo XIII, so that the Church would rediscover the action of the Holy Spirit of which she was a particular devotee.

Guerra died in Lucca on 11 April 1914. Her body was transferred in 1928 to the church of Sant’Agostino, next door to the Santa Zita clinic, which constitutes the conventual chapel of the Oblate Sisters of the Holy Spirit, where it is still venerated. Elena’s remains were subjected to canonical recognition and placed inside the main altar where they can be seen.

Elena was given the title of Apostle of the Holy Spirit. In 1930, the process for her beatification was opened and in 1953 she was beatified on April 26, 1959 by Pope John XXIII.

A sudden and baffling healing miracle attributed to invoking her name by the very ill person led to the reopening in 2012 of the ‘causa’ for Elena being made a saint. The healing was declared scientifically inexplicable by the medical board and on 13 April 2024 Pope Francis recognized it as a miracle and decreed that the canonization ceremony of the blessed Elena Guerra take place on 20 October 2024. Thus Lucca will now have three fully-fledged female saints from next month.

Incidentally what is the difference between a venerated person, a beatified one and a saint?

A venerated person is someone who has shown heroic virtues in a religious life.

A beatified person is one who in addition has caused one miracle to happen.

A saint is someone who has two miracles attributed to them in addition to being a great inspiration to humanity.

I think most of us would be extremely lucky to be even vaguely respected, let alone venerated!

The Santa Zita clinic visit was followed by one to the Palazzo Pfanner.

Here the garden is being restored but the palace museum was open where clinical instruments and documents used by Dr Pfanner (who was also a psychiatrist) were on show in the frescoed interiors.

I was so glad they’re not much used today! To take my mind off them I Imagined Nicole Kidman going down the monumental staircase in ‘Portrait of a Lady’ which was filmed in the Palazzo.

The Palazzo Pfanner (or Controni-Pfanner to give its full title) stands on the north side of Lucca. Built by the Moriconi family in 1660 using their wealth acquired through silk manufacture it was sold by them to Controni, another silk manufacturer, in 1680 who expanded it and added the monumental staircase designed by the Luccan architect Domenico Martinelli (who was also much in demand by the Hapsburg courts of Vienna and Prague).

The beautiful formal garden was designed by Filippo Juvarra. Born in Messina in 1678, Juvarra became one of Italy’s greatest baroque architects. His best work can be seen in Turin but he spent some time in the Luccan republic and designed the Villa Mansi and the Villa Garzoni together with their dramatic gardens.

In the nineteenth century the palazzo was bought by the Bavarian beer brewing family of Pfanner who still own it today and who have been engaged in a loving restoration project on their lovely house since 1996.

Going through my photographic archive I realised that I’d visited this palace in the distant 1980’s when it still housed a collection of eighteenth century costumes. Today the costumes have gone and instead there are those surgical instruments. I think I’d prefer the costumes to be back!

The rest of the palace is little changed as these almost forty (!) year-old photographs show: