Santuario Maria SS. dell'Oriente

On a hillside above the Imele valley, the Sanctuary of Maria SS. dell'Oriente preserves a thirteenth-century panel of the Byzantine Odigitria type. The church's history includes centuries of pilgrimage, earthquakes and reconstruction.

Why it matters

Documents first cite the church of Santa Maria de Orienna in the early fourteenth century, but the painted icon at its heart is older, dating at least to the first half of the thirteenth century. Tradition holds that the image escaped the iconoclasm of Leo III the Isaurian and reached Italy miraculously, a legend that explains the sanctuary's very name and its air of the Christian East. Around 1500, townspeople donated a stone altar to the Virgin. The Diocese of Avezzano counts the sanctuary among its shrines. The complex includes the medieval icon, later fresco cycles and a museum of Oriental Christian material.

What to notice

The icon belongs to the Odigitria type, or "she who shows the way", with variations from the Byzantine archetype. Mosaicist Cesare Vitali and painter Antonio D'Acchille created the mosaic altar and apse decoration in 1978, including frescoes of the Stories of the Virgin and the translation of the icon. Raffaello Solmonte painted the nave and dome in 1946; the wooden choir above the entrance dates to 1934 and was made by the Baiocco brothers. The polygonal apse was added in 1969. The museum in the convent wing holds ex-votos from the seventeenth century to about 1950, archaeological finds from Palestine, Syria and Egypt, sacred books in several languages, and coins from different periods.

Context and history

The church was renovated between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and transformed again in 1868. A convent adjoining the sanctuary was begun in 1858; work moved slowly until the Friars Minor settled there on 1 January 1896, after which the complex was completed around 1910. The Marsica earthquake of 13 January 1915 severely damaged the church, which had to be propped up, yet the flow of faithful never stopped. Reconstruction between 1931 and September 1932 radically reshaped the building, and later interventions produced its present appearance. The sanctuary remains a centre of Marian devotion in the Marsica.