Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Mondovi

The Sanctuary of Vicoforte, near Mondovì in Piedmont, is crowned by the largest elliptical dome in the world: an oval shell about 37 metres long and 25 metres wide on its axes, rising to some 74 metres above the floor. Inside, the whole vault is covered with a single continuous fresco cycle of more than six thousand square metres, so that standing beneath it one looks up into an unbroken painted sky.

The sanctuary grew from a modest roadside shrine bearing a fifteenth-century fresco of the Madonna and Child. Local tradition holds that around 1590 a hunter accidentally struck the image and it began to bleed; whatever the origin, after an epidemic of fever in the mid-1590s thousands of pilgrims came down to the valley floor in 1595. Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy seized the moment to plan a monumental church, and in 1596 entrusted it to his court architect Ascanio Vitozzi. When Vitozzi died in 1615 the walls stood only to the cornice, and the work stalled for more than a century.

It was resumed in 1728 by the Mondovì architect Francesco Gallo, encouraged by Filippo Juvarra, who devised the daring elliptical cupola and closed it in 1732. Between 1746 and the early 1750s the painters Mattia Bortoloni and Felice Biella decorated it with a vast cycle on the theme of salvation. The bell towers and three façades, designed by Camillo Riccio, were completed only in 1884. The church holds the rank of minor basilica and contains a monument to Margherita of Savoy carved by Giuseppe Gaggini in the early eighteenth century; in December 2017 the remains of King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena of Italy were brought here from Alexandria and Montpellier and laid to rest together.

Getting there

The sanctuary stands in the comune of Vicoforte, about 5 km from Mondovì, the hill town of the province of Cuneo with a station on the Turin–Savona railway. The nearest airport is Cuneo International Airport (CUF), about 28 km away.