On 11 March 1855, at the end of an octave of prayers, the people of Taggia gathered in the collegiate church saw the eyes move on a statue of the Madonna of the Sacred Heart carved by a fellow townsman, Salvatore Revelli. The event, reported again on later occasions, led the bishop of Ventimiglia to open a canonical inquiry; the records went to Rome, Pius IX declared the event miraculous and authorised the crowning of the image. Ever since, the basilica of Saints James and Philip has been known to everyone as the sanctuary of the Miraculous Madonna.
What to see
The church you see today is the Baroque one: the design is by the Roman architect Giuseppe Arcucci, chosen in 1675 by Cardinal Girolamo Gastaldi, a native of Taggia who also paid for the work, while the site was run by the master builder Girolamo Arlotti from Riva Ligure and finished in 1689, the year of consecration. The interior is a single rectangular hall under a barrel vault, with a strongly marked presbytery and fourteen side chapels, seven per side. The miraculous statue stands in the fourth chapel of the left aisle.
From the twelfth-century Romanesque church that stood here before, the white marble pulpit of 1575 survives, along with the polychrome marble baptistery and the tabernacle; the bell tower was simply raised on the medieval one. On the walls you can pick out canvases by Luca and Giovanni Cambiaso, Francesco Brea, Giuseppe Massa and Domenico Guidobono, and the relics of Saint Benedetto Revelli, another son of Taggia, are kept here. The chapter of canons of the old church founded the town's charity hospital in 1212.
Visiting
The sanctuary stands in piazza Cardinal Gastaldi, in the old centre of Taggia, a few minutes on foot from the alleys and arcades; entry is free and this is a working parish church, so during services you should visit discreetly. A full restoration between 1990 and 1996 put the interior back in order. Two dates matter: 11 March, the anniversary of the first prodigy, and the first Sunday in June, the anniversary of the crowning, when the town fills up.
Our editors' tip
Look at the statue close up and without hurrying, then ask in the sacristy about its twin: Revelli carved a similar one for the Capuchins of Loano, where in 1864 it was said to have moved its eyes and wept while Piedmontese anticlerical laws were driving the friars out of town. It is worth knowing, too, that the title of minor basilica came from Pius XII in December 1942, and that of diocesan sanctuary only in 2010: here devotion has always run ahead of the decrees.