The sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Navicella stands in Sottomarina, on the spot where, according to tradition, the Madonna appeared on 24 June 1508 to Baldissera Zalon. The gardener had gone towards evening to his master's vegetable plot to see the damage from a violent storm; the Virgin, seated on a wooden stump, drew back her veil to show the body of her dead Son, asked him to warn the bishop that the town, if it did not convert, might soon be destroyed, and left in a little boat, in dialect a «navezela».
What to see
A wooden chapel was first built on the spot, then, between 1511 and 1529, a church, consecrated in 1585 by Bishop Gabriele Fiamma, where the stump and an icon of the apparition were venerated. Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the sanctuary was put to military use and then dismantled; its works of art went to various churches in Chioggia, and the relics are now on the high altar of the basilica of San Giacomo. The present sanctuary was built in fulfilment of a vow to the Madonna for protecting the town from the bombing of the Second World War, and was consecrated in 1957 by Bishop Giovanni Battista Piasentini.
It is a church with three naves divided by piers, about twenty-one and a half metres wide, forty and a half long and 18 high. The exposed-brick façade, in Romanesque style, is divided by Istrian stone pilasters, with the central part higher; above the three entrances are mosaic niches with Saints Felix and Fortunatus and the Madonna della Navicella, and on the left is a portico. On the high altar, in a gold mosaic niche by Antonio Gatto, stands the wooden statue of the Madonna della Navicella by Ioseph Hermann; the weekday chapel has a sixteenth-century crucifix from the old sanctuary, and the inner façade a canvas of 1983 by Attilio Penzo showing the apparition.
Visiting
The sanctuary is in Sottomarina, the part of Chioggia facing the sea. Opening and service times should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
On the north side of the church the foundations of the old sanctuary can still be seen; to see the stump and the icon of the apparition, however, you need to go to the centre of Chioggia, to the basilica of San Giacomo.
