Sanctuary of Oropa

High in a natural amphitheatre of the Biellese Alps, at roughly 1,160 metres, the Sanctuary of Oropa is less a single church than a small mountain town built for the Virgin. Two basilicas, arcaded courtyards, former royal apartments and long pilgrim wings climb the slope in stages, and the whole ensemble is crowned by a great domed church that can be seen from the plain around Biella. Each year it still receives pilgrims in their hundreds of thousands.

At its heart is a small dark statue of the Madonna and Child carved in wood. Local tradition holds that Saint Eusebius, the fourth-century bishop of Vercelli, brought the image from the Holy Land and hid it among the rocks here, and that it grew too heavy to move whenever anyone tried to carry it down to the valley. Art historians date the statue to around 1300 and credit it to an unnamed sculptor from the Aosta Valley. Pilgrims still repeat old beliefs about it: that woodworm never touches it and that dust never settles on the faces of Mother and Child. Since 1620 the image has been solemnly crowned once every hundred years, a ritual that draws the whole region.

The complex grew in layers. A medieval chapel beside a huge glacial boulder was rebuilt in the early 17th century as the church now called the Ancient Basilica. Under the patronage of the House of Savoy the sanctuary then expanded through the Baroque era, with leading architects of Turin at work on its courts, among them Filippo Juvarra, who designed the monumental Royal Gate. The last and largest addition, the Upper Basilica, follows an 18th-century design by Ignazio Galletti; its first stone was laid in 1885 and it was consecrated only in 1960. Its dome rises some 80 metres and the nave holds about 3,000 people.

Above the courtyards a path climbs through the Sacro Monte di Oropa, a sequence of chapels begun in the 17th century whose painted terracotta figures tell the life of the Virgin. Together with eight other devotional mountains of Piedmont and Lombardy it forms a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The road up from Biella is also a celebrated climb of the Giro d'Italia, where Marco Pantani won a stage in 1999 after losing time to a dropped chain.

Getting there

The sanctuary stands above the city of Biella, about 9.5 km away in a straight line, and a mountain road of around 13 km climbs to it from the city; local buses run up from Biella. Biella has rail links to Turin and Novara via Santhià. The nearest airport is Turin Airport (TRN), about 54 km to the south-west.