Every August 15, since 1920, St. Michael's Maria Assunta Society celebrates the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to commemorate when God took her bodily from earth to heaven.

The society originated from the Sicilian Tusani who migrated and settled in Pawcatuck, Connecticut. They came from an ancient citadel called Tusa, overlooking the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The origin of this celebration for Tusa is documented as far back as 300 years. The first settlers of Sicily began arriving Circa 1100 B.C. and were called Sicani from an Iberian Race. About 400 years later a Roman military base called Alesa was formed on a commanding mountain top just below Tusa. During the course of military campaigns it is believed that citizens from Alesa began to move higher up to an impregnable location known as Tusa (Tusa is an ancient Arabic word for a fortress of sharp rocks, well defended by its inhabitants.)*

Past Alesa the road snakes up into scenes of olive groves, fruit trees, gardens and farms. On the climb upwards, Alesa becomes smaller on the distant mountain as you near the higher mountain peak location of Tusa. So isolated was Tusa that no documentation appears until around 800 A.D. However Aristotle (384 B.C. - 322 B.C.) mentions Tusa in his writings. Tusa emerged as a territory surrounded by fertile land and primitive construction controlled by two feudal families until 1634.

About 100 years later in 1736, the parish church was built on the same site of an earlier church called "Our Lady of Graces".

*Ref "Alesa to Tusa" by J. Giordano, 1983