The painting venerated here reached Sori in a ship's hold. It is a Black Madonna with the Child, oil on panel and probably Byzantine work, bought in the East by the Sori navigator Gerolamo Stagno on one of his voyages. To house it, a first chapel was built in 1509 along what is now via Sauli. Devotion grew quickly thanks to two episodes the town has repeated for centuries: before the panel the navigator's daughter, deaf and mute from birth, is said to have gained speech and hearing; and in 1584, after a pirate raid stripped the village, the image, carried off with the rest of the loot, was found again on the beach at Sori.
What to see
The building is no longer the one from 1509. For the first centenary of its foundation, between 1608 and 1610, local craftsmen rebuilt the chapel; two centuries later, in 1824, a conservative restoration reworked the fabric without changing its layout. What you walk into today is a single-hall church with a flat apse end: no transept, no side aisles, one long room running towards the altar.
The side chapels do not project outwards, as they do in more ambitious churches, but are cut into the thickness of the walls: the plan stays compact and the perimeter stays simple. At the centre of everything is still the Marian panel, the reason the chapel was built and then rebuilt.
Visiting
The sanctuary stands on via Sauli, inside the built-up centre of Sori, on the eastern side of the Golfo Paradiso: you reach it from the via Aurelia or from the coastal railway between Genoa and the Tigullio, then on foot. The hours are not museum hours: opening follows services and the parish's availability, so it is worth asking first. Inside, do not expect lavish decoration, this is a village church and that is its measure.
Our editors' tip
Look at the panel from close up before anything else: the dark ground and the frontal set of the face point to a painting of Eastern tradition, far from the Ligurian manner of those years. Then walk down to the seafront, where local tradition places the recovery after the raid: it is a few minutes on foot from the sanctuary to the water, and the story makes more sense seen from there.