The Letter of the Madonna to the People of Messina in Chinese by the Jesuit Metello Saccano: An Unknown Seventeenth-Century Manuscript

Abstract

The depository of the Regional Museum of Messina preserves a small, frail canvas bearing two inscriptions. The first, particularly fragmented, is in Italian in four lines, while the second is in Chinese characters in fourteen columns. The museum documentation provides no information regarding the manuscript’s significance, author, origin, and period. This article shows that the manuscript is a Chinese version of the legendary Letter of the Madonna, the letter of protection that Mary is said to have delivered to a delegation from Messina that accompanied Paul the Apostle to Jerusalem. Furthermore, the article identifies the manuscript’s author and the date of composition: the Sicilian Jesuit Metello Saccano (1612–62), a missionary in China and Cochin China from 1644 until his death. Intent on spreading the cult of the Madonna of the Letter, in the early 1660s, he sent this elegant Chinese version of the letter to Placido Giunta (1593–1674), his spiritual director and the rector of the Jesuit novitiate of Messina.