Santuario di Nostra Signora del Boschetto

On On Camogli’s green hillside, the sanctuary of Nostra Signora del Boschetto is associated with a 1518 apparition tradition and with generations of the town’s seafarers. Its cloister gallery shows maritime ex-votos — ship portraits by specialist painters — recording storms, rescues and the routes sailed by Camogli's great merchant fleet.

Why it matters

Camogli’s maritime history is reflected in the sanctuary’s collection of sailors’ ex-votos. The sanctuary stands in its own quiet locality on the hill above the borgo, where tradition says the Virgin appeared in 1518 to a girl named Angela Schiaffino, marking her hand with an "M". A chapel raised at the spot grew into a baroque church entrusted to the Servite order, whose emblem is precisely that letter. The cloister displays maritime ex-votos associated with generations of seafarers.

What to notice

The single-nave church has a richly decorated interior and an eighteenth-century vault fresco depicting the apparition to Angela Schiaffino. The cloister’s maritime ex-votos are votive paintings offered by sailors in gratitude for deliverance from danger. Their current arrangement was unveiled during celebrations marking the five-hundredth anniversary of the apparition tradition. The paintings depict ships rendered with near-technical precision in rigging and waves, the Madonna occupying a modest corner of the scene, and inscriptions naming donors, entire crews, vessels, captains and even coordinates. The sanctuary's own documentation introduces the specialist painters of this genre — among them the Roux workshop of Marseille, the Maltese Nicolas Cammillieri, Domenico Gavarrone and Angelo Arpe — and arranges the collection in sections on faith, the artists, the men, the routes and the commerce of the "thousand white sails".

Context and history

The site began as an image of the Virgin venerated by travellers crossing the small wood on the hill — the "boschetto" that gives the sanctuary its name. After the reported 1518 apparition, a chapel was built and later elevated to a church under the Servites of Mary, whose founded date places the present building in the seventeenth century. As Camogli's merchant fleet expanded from the Napoleonic wars to the age of steam, the sanctuary became the natural recipient of its gratitude: paintings were commissioned not only at home but in foreign ports such as Algiers and Le Havre, carried aboard and delivered here as thanks for deliverance. The collection now doubles as an economic archive of the town, documenting grain routes from the Black Sea, Crimean War contracts and the founding in 1853 of Camogli's pioneering mutual marine insurance. The annual feast of the Madonna del Boschetto is marked by a procession carrying the painted platform of the Virgin, known as the Cassa and weighing about 550 kilograms, through the hillside streets.