visionary child (local 'Bernadette')

The model for every child visionary of the period was Bernadette Soubirous. She was the fourteen-year-old miller’s daughter to whom the Virgin appeared eighteen times at Lourdes in 1858, and the Church approved her apparitions and later canonised her. Lourdes, and later Fatima (1917, three shepherd children), set the pattern: a poor child, a series of apparitions at a fixed spot, messages of comfort or warning, and crowds that grow with each visit.

Wartime Italy produced several such cases. The best known came in May 1944 at Ghiaie di Bonate, near Bergamo, where a seven-year-old girl, Adelaide Roncalli, reported thirteen apparitions. Crowds estimated in the hundreds of thousands gathered, but the Church eventually declined to recognise them. The Campi Flegrei girl was one of a smaller, local wave of the same phenomenon. Most such cases faded once the crisis that fed them passed.