by Piergiorgio De Guidi
The Veronese town chose Saint Joseph as its patron saint while
the local furniture industry was growing. And the Patriarch showed powerful protection of him.
BOvolone, a large center in the province of Verona, rises between the middle and lower Veronese plains, in an area of fertile agricultural cultivation between the Adige and the Po. Since 1994 it has had the title of city. Its imposing parish church is dedicated to Saint Joseph, but also retains the title of the previous patron Saint Biagio, on whose feast day an important agricultural fair is held on 3 February.
In its long history, Bovolone passed from Roman domination to the Carolingian Empire; it was then a fiefdom of the bishop of Verona, it belonged to the Serenissima Republic of Venice, to the Austrian Lombardy-Veneto and finally from 1866 to the Kingdom of Italy. While the events of great history passed through Bovolone, the life of that community took place according to the peaceful rhythms of the agricultural seasons and following the times of a good parish.
History has left its mark on the ecclesiastical buildings of Bovolone. It begins in the early Middle Ages with the first parish church, documented from the year 833. Subsequently, around the XNUMXth century, the church dedicated to saints Fermo and Rustico was built, to which, during an expansion in the XNUMXth century, saint Biagio.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, population growth made it necessary to build a new temple, capable of containing a greater number of faithful. But the foresight of the parish priests of Bovolone could not foresee the extraordinary development of the town after the Second World War. With the increase in laboratories for the restoration of furniture and the reproduction of eighteenth-century Venetian models, numerous artisan workshops specialized in carving, inlay and lacquering have developed. There are currently several companies that produce furniture in both classic and modern styles. This led to a notable increase in the population which went from six thousand inhabitants before the second conflict to the current sixteen thousand.
Returning to the construction of a new church, work began in 1835, designed by the Milanese architect Luigi Clerichetti, but was interrupted in 1857 due to lack of funds. Fifty years passed and, before the enterprise was definitively abandoned, in 1913 the archpriest Don Timoteo Lugoboni had the construction site reopened. He entrusted the architect Domenico Rupolo, of the Superintendence of Venice, with the task of developing a new project that could be implemented without modifying the existing structures. And so the grandiose work, second in size only to some large churches in the city of Verona, was inaugurated and blessed on 5 October 1935. The ornamentations remained to be completed, but finally on 6 October 1945 the new parish church of San Giuseppe was consecrated.
Since the 17s there had been a small airport in Bovolone, and for this reason during the Second World War, precisely on Sunday 1944 September XNUMX, the city was hit by a bombing and the new parish church risked being destroyed just as the " Child's Mass". The bombs grazed the roof, exploded a few meters away and the protection of Saint Joseph was evident to everyone.
Once the war ended and the living conditions of the population improved, the furnishings of the parish church began to be perfected again. In 1969 the parish priest Don Sisto Valle had the basin, above the semicircular plan of the apse, decorated with the figure of Christ the King of the universe, surrounded by ten angels and the patron saints Saint Biagio and Saint Joseph. The painting, a work by Marcello Vianello based on a sketch by Giuseppe Resi, inaugurated on 3 February 1970, represents Saint Joseph with his head bent forward, eyes turned downwards as a sign of humility, holding a hand saw. San Biagio, on the other hand, holds up the new church and looks straight at the people, as if he wanted to invite them to love it. At the base is the inscription: Salus populi ego sum (I am the salvation of the people). These were the years in which the country's economy, as we have said, was oriented towards the production of period furniture; therefore there was no saint more suitable to protect us than the Carpenter of Nazareth.
Since 2002 and for ten years, Monsignor has been parish priest of Bovolone. Renzo Bonetti, who had previously played a role for family pastoral care in the bodies of the Italian Episcopal Conference. In 2008 in Bovolone Msgr. Bonetti began an innovative family ministry through the "Famiglia Dono Grande" foundation, of which he was president and whose ultimate aim is to make the family live as the "great gift" for future generations. Having had important restoration work carried out on the parish structures, he wanted an invocation to Saint Joseph to be introduced at the end of each mass to obtain the material and spiritual graces necessary to carry out the mission entrusted to our community. The prayer is still recited today (see box).