The sanctuary is medieval in origin and stands outside the built-up area, where the woods once began. In a document of 1261 the Romanesque chapel is called the opera di Santa Maria, belonged to the Benedictines and stood near a ford on the road between Boves and Peveragno: a stopping place for pilgrims and travellers. The first document naming it outright is a will of 1291, in which donna Ricolda leaves 12 soldi to the opera di Santa Maria at Boves.
What to see
As the fields around Boves spread, the wood shrank, and already between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the chapel had become a local sanctuary, a destination for confraternity pilgrimages and a point of reference for the farmers of the area. In the fourteen-seventies a master of Ligurian-Piedmontese training frescoed it with a cycle devoted to the Stories of the Virgin and the childhood of Christ: the surviving sequence numbers nine scenes and is held to be the most precious painted cycle in this part of the province.
Visiting
In the seventeenth century, with pilgrimages increasing and the population grown, the building was enlarged again, and the enlargement was followed by a new cycle of frescoes devoted to the Virtues and the Coronation of Mary in heaven. That is why inside you read, side by side, the Gothic, the Renaissance and the Baroque: each season left its own wall.
Our editors' tip
Take your time over the nine fifteenth-century scenes before looking at the rest. This is storytelling painting, made for people who could not read, and it still works that way: you follow it like a strip, one panel at a time. Recent archaeological surveys have found foundations older than the Romanesque ones, so the spot was a fixed point on the road long before the chapel.