Cercando Bernadette

“Imperfect, rebellious, unconventional.” In this journey in search of the truth, the well-known biblical scholar Alberto Maggi dismantles every cliché built over the years around Bernadette Soubirous — the girl who saw the Virgin Mary — and clarifies the mysteries behind her mystical experience, taking us himself to the real places where the story unfolded.

Brother Alberto Maggi, of the Order of the Servants of Mary, guides us through the places where Bernadette Soubirous lived. He is joined by the writer Don Alessandro Amapani, by Father Nicola Ventriglia, who leads the Italian pilgrimages to Lourdes, and by Mariarita Ferri, who runs the Baths.

What emerges is a portrait that breaks every cliché and gives us back a deeply human Bernadette, with the stubbornness and small flaws that at the time earned her the hostility of many — including the sisters of Nevers, where she withdrew during the last years of her short life to escape the clamour caused by the apparitions.

Bernadette had never believed that the Beautiful Lady and the water from the grotto could work miracles; and in roughly a hundred and fifty years the Church itself has recognised only seventy miraculous healings. Yet there is one singular miracle that keeps drawing millions of pilgrims from all over the world to this small town in the middle of the Pyrenees: the miracle of meeting oneself through Mary, which sends people home different from how they left.

The score

The main theme of the documentary is an Ave Maria written for soprano and performed by Chiara Taigi. Around that theme move the pieces tied to the places of the story — La grotta, L’acqua miracolosa — written to sit underneath Maggi’s voice without ever competing with it.