At 1320 metres, the sanctuary of Maria Santissima del Monte Saraceno occupies a spot that was military before it was holy. The traces still readable on the ridge suggest a lookout post, Lombard first and then Saracen; beside those ruins the Benedictine monks raised the little church you see today. Where the name comes from, Monte Saraceno or Castel Saraceno, nobody knows for certain.
What to see
The architecture is stripped to the minimum: a barrel-like structure whose staves are the thick walls themselves, planted sheer above the crags around it. Inside stands the Sacred Effigy, which is not a whole statue but a recomposition: the pieces of the old copy of the Byzantine statue of the Madonna de Plano, wrecked by the Basilicata earthquake of 1857, were retrieved from the rubble and put back together by a Neapolitan artist. The Madonna holds a golden rose in her left hand and with her right seems to be showing the Child, standing between her knees.
The case that shelters her, known locally as the Caggia, is the work of local carvers: cut by hand from oak, with pilasters, columns and capitals. On the back it carries a painting of the sanctuary and the hermit's cave: some 200 metres away, a local legend says, a pious man lived alone on what the shepherds gave him. Another version adds that once the hermit had vanished, the shepherds found a wooden statue of the Madonna, and the chapel was built on that spot.
Visiting
The statue is not up here all year: it climbs in procession from the parish church on the second Sunday of May and stays watching over the valley, over the crops and the flocks, until 8 and 9 September, when it is carried back down. Tradition holds that no pilgrim should go in without first walking three times round the building, praying and singing dirges.
Our editors' tip
If you want to find the effigy in place, come up between May and September; the rest of the year the little church is empty and the Madonna is down in the village. And before going in, do the three laps of the perimeter as the pilgrims do: it is the quickest way to grasp how little ground there is between the walls and the drop.