Madonna della Corona Sanctuary (Spiazzi)

The Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Crown, the Madonna della Corona, seems to hang in mid-air. It is built into a sheer limestone wall on the eastern flank of Monte Baldo, at 774 metres, with a vertical drop below it to the valley of the Adige and an overhang of rock above it like a lid, so that from a distance the white church looks wedged into a crack of the mountain. Few places of pilgrimage make their setting so much a part of the devotion: the whole approach is a walk along the cliff, and the view from the terrace falls straight down to the river and the road far below.

Religious life on this ledge is old. Hermits attached to the abbey of San Zeno in Verona were living in the Baldo area around the year 1000, and by the 13th century there was a small monastery with a chapel to St Mary of Montebaldo. The object of veneration is a Pietà carved in local stone, only 70 centimetres high, with an inscription naming Lodovicus de Castrobarco and the year 1432. Local tradition tells a different story, holding that in 1522, as the Ottomans took Rhodes, angels carried the statue from that island to this rock; the sanctuary's own history points out that the dated carving is older than the legend. Two stairways were cut into the cliff in the 15th and 16th centuries, one of them a narrow path of a couple of hundred steps hewn along the original rocky route.

The church was rebuilt several times on the same cramped shelf: a new building was raised about four metres above the old one between 1625 and 1685, a Gothic façade was added in 1899 by Giuseppe Magagnotti, and between 1975 and 1978 the architect Guido Tisato reconstructed the whole sanctuary on its ledge. The shrine became a minor basilica in 1982, and Pope John Paul II came here in 1988. Pilgrims still arrive the traditional way, climbing the Sentiero della Speranza, the Path of Hope, from Brentino Belluno on the valley floor.

Getting there

The sanctuary sits above the Adige valley below the village of Spiazzi; Bussolengo is about 20 km away, and Verona Villafranca Airport (VRN) about 28 km. From Spiazzi a path and stairway lead down along the cliff to the church. On foot from the valley, the pilgrim path climbs from Brentino Belluno.