In 1478, so tradition says, the Virgin appeared here to a mute shepherd boy, who on seeing her recovered his speech and ran to tell the village. The people who hurried to the spot found a wooden statue of the Virgin on a beech tree: it is the one that still stands in the niche of the presbytery. The sanctuary was born from that episode, with the consent of Pope Innocent VIII recorded in a text of 1486, and it was willed by the Augustinian friar Battista Poggi.
What to see
The interior has three naves and its pointed arches give away a late Gothic structure, while the gilded stucco and the high altar in polychrome marble are baroque. In the wooden choir, carved in 1585, a panel holds the Baptism of Saint Augustine by Ottavio Semino; on the left flank a fresco by Giovanni Quinzio tells the story of the apparition and the building of the sanctuary. The Virgin's statue has no known author: art historians class it as acheiropoieton, not made by human hands, and its origin may be Byzantine.
Visiting
The sanctuary stands on via Santuario, along the provincial road, and from the village you reach it on foot across the Doria bridge. The convent beside it holds more than you would expect: in the lower cloister a permanent photographic display on the places of worship of the Trebbia valley, upstairs the museum of sacred art and the farming museum of the upper valley. In the refectory, now a chapel, two frescoes by unknown hands survive: a Life of Saint Augustine and a Last Supper that some have tried to link to Leonardo because of certain resemblances to the Milanese one. It is a hypothesis, not an attribution.
Our editors' tip
Ask to see the refectory: the Last Supper is not in the church, and anyone who goes in by the main door alone will miss it. And look at the façade knowing it dates from 1897: what looks like the oldest part is in fact the newest.