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loreto |
| One of Italy's most popular sites of pilgrimage, attracting four
million visitors every year, LORETO owes its existence to one of the
Catholic Church's more surreal legends. The story goes that in 1292,
when the Muslims kicked the Crusaders out of Palestine, a band of angels
flew the house of Mary from Nazareth to Dalmatia, and then, a few years
later, whisked it across the Adriatic to Loreto. In the face of growing
scepticism, the Vatican came up with the more plausible story that the
Holy House was transported to Loreto on board a Crusader ship. Not
surprisingly, though, this theory doesn't seem to have the same hold on
the Catholic imagination, and the Madonna of Loreto continues to be
viewed as the patron of aviators: Lindbergh took an image of the Madonna
of Loreto on his landmark Atlantic flight in 1927, and a medallion
inscribed with her image also accompanied the crew of Apollo 9. Among
the Madonna of Loreto's more unlikely fans were Galileo, denounced and
imprisoned as a heretic, and Descartes, who reckoned she'd helped him
refine his philosophical method. For centuries she was also credited
with military victories (presumably she was thought to have power over
projectiles), though the builders of Loreto's basilica, aware that the
site was vulnerable to Turkish pirates, decided not to rely on the
Madonna's defensive capabilities, and accordingly constructed a
formidable fortified church here. Loreto's treasures were indeed covetable, the most costly and idiosyncratic being a golden baby donated by Louis XIII of France, weighing exactly the same as his long-awaited heir, the future Louis XIV. The basilica was ransacked in 1798 by Napoleonic troops, most of the plunder ending up on the shelves of the Louvre in Paris. Following Napoleon's demise, subsequent popes managed to retrieve many of the valuables, but the majority were stolen again in 1974, in what became known as the "holy theft of the century". Numbering among its contributors such figures as Bramante, Antonio da Sangallo, Sansovino, Lotto and Luca Signorelli, the basilica is a must for anyone even mildly interested in the Renaissance. However, for the nonbeliever the atmosphere of devotional hard-sell can soon become stifling. Loreto can also be a distressing or a moving place, depending on your attitude to faith - between April and October so-called "white trains" bring the sick and terminally ill on three-day missions of hope, the main event being a Mass in Piazza della Madonna, outside the basilica |