Why Go
A basilica built around a house
Loreto is the reverse of almost every other great church. Elsewhere the building comes first and the relics are placed inside it. Here the walls came first, and everything else in the sanctuary was raised to protect and honor them: a marble screen carved by the best sculptors in Italy, a dome, a nave, a ring of fortified apses, and finally a square with a palace along one side.
What stands at the center is small and plain. Three walls of stone and brick, about eight and a half meters by four, roughly the size of a single room. Catholic tradition venerates them as the walls of the house at Nazareth where Mary lived and received the announcement of the angel. Pilgrims have come for that reason since the end of the thirteenth century, and popes have come with them.
The sanctuary is worth the journey for the same reason it has always been worth it: not because the stones settle a historical question, but because Catholics have prayed the Annunciation here for seven centuries, and the building around them is one of the most intelligent things the Italian Renaissance ever made.
Loreto is a shrine of the Incarnation before it is a shrine of a relic. What the Church asks a pilgrim to contemplate here is the event the house is remembered for, not a settled account of how the stones arrived.
What the walls are, and what is known about them
The Holy House is not a complete building. It is three walls with no fourth side of its own, and the sanctuary's own account explains why: at Nazareth the dwelling was a masonry front built against a grotto in the rock, and the grotto was the fourth room. That cave is still in Nazareth, beneath the Basilica of the Annunciation. The three walls at Loreto are traditionally identified with the built front of that same dwelling. A fourth wall was added at Loreto to close the room, and the image of Our Lady of Loreto stands against it.
Catholic tradition holds that the house was carried from Nazareth by angels, arriving on the laurel hill above the Adriatic in December 1294. That tradition is old, it is what the shrine has always taught, and the sanctuary itself had it carved in marble on the outside of the screen in the sixteenth century. The sanctuary also sets beside it a second reading of the same events: that after the crusader states fell in 1291, Christians saved the stones of the house and brought them west by sea, by way of Illyria, where the shrine at Trsat preserves the memory of that stage. Popular accounts often name a particular family as the carriers. The documents on which that identification rests were published only in the twentieth century, from copies rather than originals, and historians have questioned them, so Eternal Roam does not present the shippers as known.
What the excavations found is narrower and firmer. Between 1962 and 1965 the ground beneath the walls was opened under the direction of Nereo Alfieri of the University of Bologna, with the geologist Edmondo Forlani. The three walls have no foundations of their own. They stand on bare, uneven ground, over the line of what had been a public road. Whatever else is true, the structure was not built where it now stands. The sanctuary adds two further arguments from the material itself: that the stone does not match the building practice of the surrounding Recanati countryside but matches Palestinian work of the Roman period, and that the plan of the three walls corresponds to the perimeter of the grotto at Nazareth. It also cites graffiti of early Judeo-Christian character found on the stones. These are the shrine's arguments, and they are serious ones, but they belong to a case still argued rather than a matter closed.
What can be said plainly is this. The devotion is documented from the end of the thirteenth century. Clement V granted indulgences to pilgrims here in 1310, and Paul II wrote openly of the translation in 1464. The stones are old, they are foreign to the hill they rest on, and Catholics have prayed before them without interruption for seven hundred years.
Approach from Piazza della Madonna and the sequence is legible in one view. The square gathers pilgrims in front of a white marble facade finished in 1587 under Sixtus V, with Vanvitelli's bell tower beside it and the dome behind. Walk around the east end and the building changes character entirely: brick, blank, ringed by round apses with battlements and a covered wall-walk. That is not decoration. Loreto stood exposed to Adriatic raiding, and the church was fortified because of what it holds.
Inside, the nave runs east and the dome marks the crossing. Under the dome stands a rectangular block of white marble about as tall as a house, carved on all four sides with prophets, sibyls, and scenes from the life of the Virgin. This is the screen, and it is not the Holy House. Julius II sent Bramante to design it in 1507. Andrea Sansovino directed the carving from 1513, and the work continued under Leo X, Clement VII, and Paul III, passing through Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Girolamo Lombardo, Baccio Bandinelli, Raffaello da Montelupo, and others before it was finished. The Annunciation on the west face, toward the nave, is Sansovino's.
The walls that pilgrims come for are inside that marble box. You go in through a low door, and the change is the point of the whole building: from the most accomplished sculpture of the High Renaissance to rough stone, a lamp-darkened ceiling, and a room the size of a small kitchen.
