wooden madonna

I stumbled upon this wooden shrine to the Madonna on a boxing day excursion up Mount Etna. Snow was beginning to cover the road, the temperature was dropping drastically as we ascended, and we were seeing an increasing number of vehicles equipped with snow chains, so we decided not risk going much farther and stopped about halfway up at a restaurant/bed & breakfast place (Rifugio Ragabo – somewhere between Linguaglossa and Piano Provenzana, and around 1425m vertically) for a coffee before turning back. This curious little shrine sat outside in the car park.