A shepherd named Benedetto Pareto said he had seen the Virgin on the summit of Monte Figogna and had been told to build a chapel there. He answered that he was a poor man and could not do it, then went home and told nobody. A few days later he fell from a tree and was left in a critical state; he recovered, and it was the recovery, more than the vision, that made him speak. Tradition puts the episode on 29 August 1490, some scholars move it to 1487; the oldest document that mentions it is a notarial deed of 1530 kept in the historical archive of the archbishop's curia in Genoa. Out of that account grew the greatest Marian shrine in Liguria, today a minor basilica on the summit, at 804 metres.
What to see
The church you visit today is the third built up here. According to tradition Pareto himself put up the first chapel on the spot of the apparition: a rectangular room with a wooden roof, now kept inside the Chapel of the Apparition, with a marble Madonna in the niche, an altar of 1632 and a statue of the shepherd added in 1850. The first shrine was built between 1528 and 1530 with donations from the faithful and from the Ghersi family; the new pilgrims' hospice, paid for by the Durazzo brothers, opened in 1785 after years of work slowed by the labour of hauling materials to the top.
The present basilica is a nineteenth-century building with a troubled site history: a first design was dropped because of its cost, the foundation stone was laid in 1857, and in 1865 the location was judged unsuitable and what had been built was pulled down. Work restarted in 1866 on a design by the Milanese engineer Luigi Bisi, levelling part of the summit with unpaid labour from the people of the Polcevera valley; the church was finished in 1889 and inaugurated on 26 May 1890. Inside, a Latin cross and three aisles: the frescoes on the life of the Virgin are by Antonio Giuseppe Santagata (1963), those in the dome by Pasquale Arzuffi, with Mary among the patron saints of the Republic of Genoa. Behind the marble altar, in a small tempietto, is the statue of the Madonna della Guardia carved by Antonio Canepa in 1894. A door in the left aisle opens on the hall of offerings: hundreds of paintings, photographs and objects left by people who felt they had been healed or protected from illness, accidents, wars and shipwrecks.
Visiting
Until 1929 the summit could only be reached on foot; then the autoguidovia came into service, carrying pilgrims up from the valley floor. In 1963 the road was opened, provincial road 52, which climbs eleven kilometres from Bolzaneto, and in 1967 the autoguidovia, by then uneconomical, closed. Today you come by car from Genoa, some twenty kilometres away, or on foot along the paths of the Polcevera valley. From the terrace in front of the church, on a clear day, the view takes in the valley, part of Genoa and both Rivieras; in winter, when the air is sharp, the mountains of Corsica stand out.
Our editors' tip
We suggest giving a good quarter of an hour to the hall of offerings: it is the part that says most, because it is not about architecture but about the people who climbed up here, often on foot, to give thanks for still being alive. And if you have the legs and the time, walk at least the last stretch of the ascent: this church was built by men who carried the materials up the same slope. Popes have come too: John Paul II in 1985, Benedict XVI in 2008 and Francis in 2017, who had lunch here with a group of poor people, prisoners and refugees.