The woman leads monthly rallies for the alleged apparition of the Virgin Mary at the Lake Bracciano hillside town of Trevignano.
Making her monthly appearance on the third day of the month, when hundreds come to see Mary appear on the Campo delle Rose, and ringed by bodyguards to keep journalists at bay, Gisella Cardia said “I intend to keep staying here and I won't budge an inch because I'm in the house of God and I have the Madonna on my side”.
The Vatican's observatory on apparitions said Wednesday “if she is making money out of it, filthy lucre, then it's probably a fake”.
Around a thousand believers turned up Wednesday, telling reporters “the Madonna has been speaking to us for years”.
As well as pointing out the apparitions, Cardia tells the assembled crowd what the Virgin is telling her, usually messages of hope.
Cardia, a 53-year-old soothsayer who moved to Trevignano after receiving a two-year suspended sentence for bankruptcy when her ceramics firm went bust in Sicily in 2013, has been hosting the apparition events for the last five years.
The former businesswoman, who until a few years ago went by her birth name, Maria Giuseppa Scarpulla, has also said the statue of the Virgin Mary she bought in the Bosnian apparition shrine of Medjugorje a few years ago has started to shed tears of blood.
A diocesan commission set up to probe the weeping Mary statue is expected to confirm that the events reported are not of supernatural origin, according to 'Il Segno di Giona ('The Sign of Jonah'), a website specialised in Satanism and the occult.
Cardia has also said she has been lucky in her efforts to feed the hundreds of visitors to the alleged apparition site, since she has found she is able to multiply gnocchi and pizza.
ANSA
