The chapel in the field
Ta’ Pinu sits on its own in open country below Għarb, with no village attached to it, which is the first thing to understand about the place. It is not a parish church. It is a shrine in a field, and it was a small roadside chapel for centuries before anything else happened there.
It takes its name from Pinu Gauci, who became its procurator and in 1611 paid for its restoration, put in a stone altar, and commissioned the painting of the Assumption that is still above it.
1883
On 22 June 1883 a forty-five-year-old woman called Karmela Grima was passing the chapel when she heard a woman’s voice calling her. The voice called again from inside; she went in, prayed, and was asked to recite three Ave Marias. She then fell ill and was bedridden for over a year.
She told nobody for some time. When she eventually told a friend, Francesco Portelli, he said that he had also heard a voice near the chapel urging him to pray, and his mother’s recovery from illness was afterwards attributed to Our Lady of Ta’ Pinu. The bishop of Gozo, Pietru Pace, examined the accounts and concluded the voice was of heavenly origin.
What followed was not a single event but a slow accumulation: pilgrimages, reported favours, and eventually a building.
The basilica
The present Romanesque church was begun in 1920 and opened in 1932. In 1935 Pius XI raised it to the dignity of a minor basilica, and the image of Our Lady was crowned the same year.
The old chapel was not demolished. It stands behind the high altar of the new church, which you can walk through to, and it remains the actual point of the place. The new building is in effect a very large shelter built around a very small one.
John Paul II prayed in that chapel in May 1990 and decorated the image with five golden stars. Benedict XVI presented a Golden Rose in April 2010.
Along the approach are mosaic panels, and beside the church is the corridor of ex-votos: crutches, plaster casts, children’s clothes, photographs, letters, fragments of wrecked vehicles, left by people in thanks. Whatever you make of the theology, that corridor is a hundred-year record of what Gozitan families feared and what they were grateful for, and it is the part of the site most visitors walk past.
The small chapels
The Gozitan countryside is scattered with chapels, most of them small, many of them old, a good number of them locked except on one day a year.
They are not decorative. Several predate the parishes around them, and some were built as a field chapel so that farming families a long walk from the village could hear Mass. A few stand where a village used to be and no longer is.
The ones worth looking for are the ones you come upon rather than drive to.
What survives beside the Church
Gozo is overwhelmingly and visibly Catholic. It also retains a layer of older belief that sits alongside that without any apparent contradiction, which is the thing outsiders find hardest to read correctly.
The għajn, the eye, is the clearest example: the belief that envy can do harm, and that one guards against it. The painted eyes on the bows of the traditional luzzu fishing boats are the visible form of it, and they are not simply decoration, though whether a given fisherman today means it or merely keeps it is a question with eighteen different answers.
Other fragments persist in the same way: things said when a child is admired, objects kept for luck, dates on which particular things are and are not done. The honest position is that this varies hugely by family and by generation, that it is not performed for visitors, and that the right posture towards it is interest rather than collection.
Holy Week
If you want to see all of this at once, come at Easter rather than in summer.
Good Friday brings life-size statue processions through several villages in the afternoon and evening, and the island is silent in a way it never otherwise is: no music anywhere, nothing open, nothing playing. On Easter Sunday morning the mood inverts completely, and in several villages the statue of the Risen Christ is carried at a run, uphill.
Those two days tell you more about Gozo than a week in August does.
Elsewhere on the island
- Practical Getting to Gozo, and getting around once you are there The car ferry, the fast ferry from Valletta, the buses that all go through Victoria, and whether you actually need a car. Including the fare quirk that catches everyone once.
- Countryside The Gozo countryside: terraces, walls and valley walks A plateau cut by valleys, held up by dry stone walls somebody still maintains. Where to walk, when not to, and what you are actually looking at.
- Crafts & artists Crafts and makers on Gozo Lace, filigree, blown glass and pottery, the crafts village at Ta’ Dbieġi, and how to tell what was made on the island from what was flown in to be sold here.
Questions
What happened at Ta’ Pinu?
On 22 June 1883 a woman named Karmela Grima, then forty-five, was passing the old chapel when she heard a woman's voice calling her. When it called again from inside she went in and prayed, and the voice asked her to say three Ave Marias. She was ill and bedridden for more than a year afterwards. She eventually told a friend, Francesco Portelli, who said he had heard a voice urging him to pray as well, and his mother's recovery was attributed to Our Lady of Ta’ Pinu. The bishop of the day, Pietru Pace, concluded the voice was of heavenly origin.
Why is it called Ta’ Pinu?
After Pinu Gauci, who became procurator of the chapel and in 1611 paid to restore it, put in a stone altar and commissioned the Assumption painting still above it. Pinu is a Maltese form of Philip. The chapel had previously been known by another name entirely; this one stuck after the property changed hands in 1858.
Can you visit Ta’ Pinu, and is there a dress code?
Yes, it is open to visitors and it is free. It is a working shrine rather than a monument, so Mass and private prayer are going on around you. Shoulders and knees covered is the expectation, as at any church on the islands. The mosaics along the approach and the room of ex-votos are the two things people miss by walking straight in and straight out.
What are the ex-votos?
Objects left in thanks for something believed to have been granted: plaster casts, crutches, children's clothing, photographs, letters, pieces of a crashed vehicle. They are displayed in a corridor beside the church and they are the most affecting thing on the site, whatever you believe about them. They are also a century-long record of what ordinary Gozitan families were frightened of.
Is the evil eye still a real belief in Gozo?
The għajn, the eye, is still widely recognised and the protections against it are visible rather than hidden: the painted eyes on the bows of the luzzu fishing boats are the obvious example and nobody treats them as decoration alone. How seriously any individual takes it varies enormously, generally with age. It coexists with ordinary Catholic practice without any apparent difficulty, which is the characteristic thing about Maltese folk belief.
What is the biggest church in Gozo?
The Rotunda at Xewkija, whose dome is among the largest in Europe and dominates the view from most of the island. It was built around the older parish church, which stayed in use throughout, and the earlier building was only dismantled once the new one was finished.