San Biagio between faith and tradition: the gluttony, the sun in the houses and the panettone

by Mina del Nunzio

Lived between the third and fourth centuries in Sebaste in Armenia (Asia Minor), he was a doctor and was appointed bishop of his city. We do not have much information on this saint, but we refer to some epistolary traces of which the origin is unknown. he was captured by the Romans and was killed apparently he was beheaded for he was asked to renounce Catholicism.

It is said that a mother in panic and desperation because her son of a few years was suffocating with fish bones, asked for help from San Biagio who was a doctor, saved the child with a crumb of bread and it was exactly the next day the candlestick.

On February 3, the Church commemorates San Biagio with a function that involves the lighting of two crossed candles under the throat of each believer. San Biagio, in the popular exception, is also the saint who brings the sun into the houses, that is, punctually on this day we feel an extra glimmer of light in our house that can have two meanings: one that winter has now passed and two that spring is still far away.

But what do the Milanese say about the panettone left over from Christmas day. A very Milanese tradition in fact it seems that a woman had brought the panettone from friar Desiderio before Christmas to have it blessed, but the friar was so busy that he had forgotten. After Christmas, finding the cake still in the sacristy and thinking that by now the woman would never come back to get it, he had blessed and ate it.

But when on February 3 the housewife showed up to get the panettone back, the friar, mortified, confessed to having finished it, so he went to the sacristy to take the empty plate, finding instead a panettone twice the size of what woman had brought. A miracle, in fact, which was attributed to San Biagio: for this reason, correct tradition has it that today we eat a slice of leftover and blessed panettone for breakfast to have protection from throat ailments.