Naples "miracle chair" draws childless couples

By Antonella Ciancio

NAPLES (Reuters) - An ordinary old armchair under a worn blanket in a three-room flat in Naples draws thousands of hopeful pilgrims. Pasted all over the walls around it are birth announcements: pink for girls, blue for boys.

Childless women from all over the world flock to the "miracle" chair -- close to Speranzella street whose name suggests hope -- in the picturesque Spanish Quarter of Naples. There they ask Saint Mary Frances of the Five Wounds of Jesus for a miracle.

With her "miracles" reported on Weblogs, the saint's shrine has become a main stop on the religious tourism circuit in Naples, a city which in Italy is almost as well known for veneration of saints as for the Camorra crime syndicate.

"The saint is waiting for you," Sister Elisa, an energetic 65-year-old nun from the order that has guarded the shrine for two centuries, tells hundreds of men and women of all ages gathered for morning prayer at the nearby church.

After the Mass, worshippers are led up a steep staircase and along a narrow corridor into the flat where the saint, born Anna Maria Rosa Nicoletta Gallo, spent half her life in chastity and mystical suffering until her death in 1791 at the age of 76.

Hair shirts and a whip hanging from the walls remind pilgrims of the grim "voluntary penance" the saint adopted after joining the strict order of Saint Peter of Alcantara.

As the religious name she took suggests, she was believed to carry the "stigmata" or wounds of Jesus. She was the first woman saint born in Naples, but there is no hint in her life story as to why her help is sought by childless women in particular.

"Are you married?" Sister Maria Giuliana whispers to a young woman sitting on the armchair, before touching the visitor's breast and belly with a "monstrance" or reliquiary containing a vertebra and a lock of hair from the saint.