Pietrelcina

Today, the place most identified with Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina is not his birthplace Pietrelcina, in the vicinity of Benevento, but rather the Puglia town of San Giovanni Rotondo, in the province of Foggia, where the largest Italian shrine dedicated to him was built and where the saint rests.

In his native Pietrelcina, the scene every year of a well-attended living nativity scene, the Convent of the Capuchin Fathers, a religious order to which Padre Pio belonged, completed in 1928 on a site indicated by the future saint himself and home to a small museum where objects related to his life are kept, and the house where Padre Pio was born, in Viale Cappuccini, are noteworthy.

The village itself has a past almost a thousand years old, mentioned in historical documents as early as 1133 and passed from hand to hand through various lineages up to the Caracciolos, the D'Aquinos and the Carafas. Two other churches, both rebuilt after an earthquake in 1688, are worth visiting: these are Sant'Anna, with the relics of another San Pio donated by the Carafa family in the early 19th century, and Santa Maria degli Angeli, where the Madonna della Libera, the local patron saint, is worshipped and where Padre Pio celebrated his first mass.

The saint is said to have received the first manifestation of the stigmata in a place just north of Pietrelcina, at Pietra Romana, which in turn has become a place of pilgrimage.