At the Santissima spring important cults developed over time associating water with healing, fertility both in the fields and in human female pregnancy and maternal care. In this place consolidated some Christian cults that overlapped with more ancient beliefs. In fact, a tradition reports that the Emperor Theodosius II (401-450 AD) and Pope Sixtus III founded here a building dedicated to the Holy Trinity which appeared right at the spring in 437 AD. This event is a myth built a posteriori to justify a presence of Christianity in a place that boasted waters with properties considered thaumaturgical and where the karst resurgences evoked unusual natural phenomena. The Holy Trinity solemnity was established in 1331 while the church was built in 1339-1340, perhaps on a previous building of which no memory remains. Before the arrival of the Franciscan friars in 1588, the church was full of ex-votos dedicated to fertility as Narciso di Prampero reports in his manuscript 'Specchio de verita (1560)', '... et gli appendono, per voto, insino li membri genitali fatti d'argento'. In addition, it was common then to find couples around the church engaged in the practice of an 'assisted procreation'. The Franciscan friars did not succeed in stopping these worships that attracted young people from very distant villages; indeed, in the 18th century even some friars ended up on trial for acts of indiscipline and moral corruption.
In the place, there was always a certain mixture of worship between the Holy Trinity and the Holy Mary, so that the latter veneration as mother, is reiterated in three altars of the church and in the Immaculate Virgin Mary shrine located at the same spring, which refer to the Marian cult in a maternal and protective sense. Women who were unable to breastfeed went to the sanctuary to pray to Nursing Madonna, also venerated through a statue placed near the main altar in the church. Even the popular baskets fair (sagra dei Sest or Thest) in early September seemed to refer to the birth of the Virgin Mary. The Holy Trinity cult served to mitigate with the Marian devotion the worship in therapeutic properties of the spring waters. Besides, in popular tradition there is an intimate relationship between the Holy Trinity and Virgin Mary, and this is confirmed also in some cults carried out at this place.
Great was the devotion for this place and its waters and consequently it was not uncommon to see entire villages arrive in procession to ask for the grace of rain during summer periods of great drought. The Santissima spring was therefore a good omen moment of distress and great difficulty, both individual and collective.
The karst phenomenon, sources and the river.
Water is the charactering element of the current humid landscape of the Palù where the Livenza river originates, same as it was in the distant past. After the end of the last glaciation and the retreat of the glacial masses, the main action of shaping and transforming the landscape was produced by the karst phenomenon. The essence of karst processes is given by the progressive dissolution of the rock and the establishment of particular forms of corrosion, both on the surface and along the cracks that allow water to pass through the limestone formations.
The Cansiglio-Monte Cavallo group is a limestone massif without superficial hydrography and highly karstified: this depends on the carbonate composition of the rocks, the presence of numerous faults and fractures, the layers arrangement over a slightly inclined terrain, and the high rainfall area. The karst springs that flow at the foot of the southern slope of the massif are fed by the waters that cross the permeable carbonate limestone mass and come out where they meet the layers of impermeable rocks of the Miocene age. The amount of water that flows from these springs depends on the rainfall that affects the mountain-massif above. Furthermore, it affects the variations in the water table level in the basin, causing the flooding of the Palù in times of intense and prolonged rain.
Two main branches of the Livenza river arise in Palù from the perennial karst sources of Molinetto and Santissima, merging into a single bed that comes out of the basin at the Ponte del Livenza between Col del Conte and Tenuta Longone. At this point, there is a natural threshold formed by the detrital barrier produced by the third branch of Livenza river coming from the Gorgazzo source and from the fan of the Mena stream. From the south area of the old centre of Polcenigo, the river flows in the territory of the Veneto-Friuli plain along a course of about 111 km, flowing into the Adriatic Sea at Porto Santa Margherita. Thanks to its flow and the depth of the bed, the Livenza river has been an important fluvial route that has developed movements and communications between the northern foothills and the Adriatic coast since ancient times.

Type of Data Point - Publicly Available Information

Santissima Spring - Public Info

Visit page of the element - Santissima Spring

Inserted: 13-08-2023 22:08:04