St. Anne's Day in Italy

The agrarian cycle connected to the threshing of wheat , where rituals, ancestrally dedicated to the "great mother," with the advent of Christianity are frequently dedicated to patron saints and, in July, to St. Anne, recurring on the 26th of the month , a feast during which it is customary to use ears of corn as elements to be shaped in a symbolic key for decorations.

The Orthodox Church celebrates the feast of St. Anne on July 25; the Catholic Church with Pope Sixtus IV set the date of the liturgical memorial on July 26. Anne and her husband Joachim are also venerated by the Coptic Church. The saint is invoked as the patroness of mothers and women in childbirth.

St. Anne, whose name of Hebrew derivation means "grace" , is the mother of the Virgin and is mentioned in the apocryphal gospels , along with her husband Joachim. According to the gospel of the Nativity of Mary, the couple only after twenty years of prayer had a daughter, on whom an angel imposed the name Mary. The saint holds a variety of patronages , but she is considered above all the patroness of mothers of families, widows, and women in childbirth and is invoked against marital sterility.