Santuario di Nostra Signora delle Grazie (San Bernardino)

At 390 metres on the ridge between Vernazza and Corniglia, the hamlet of San Bernardino centres on the Sanctuary of Nostra Signora delle Grazie. The early twentieth-century building replaced a chapel recorded in 1584 and preserves a Marian devotion connected with the surrounding hillside communities.

Why it matters

The sanctuary is the spiritual centre of San Bernardino, one of the small hillside hamlets of the Cinque Terre. Though its present building dates from the beginning of the twentieth century, it continues a devotion associated with an earlier chapel on the mountainside. Local tradition recounts that people from Corniglia came to restore an old painting of the Madonna in the eighteenth century and found the image miraculously untouched.

What to notice

The simple mountain sanctuary is set among dry-stone terraces and low houses. Inside is the crowned image of the Madonna and Child, whose coronation ceremony took place in 1874. The surrounding hamlet and its cultivated slopes form part of the high Cinque Terre landscape, where small settlements occupy the rocky ridge above the coastal villages.

Context and history

A chapel at San Bernardino is attested from 1584. The present sanctuary was erected at the beginning of the twentieth century, carrying forward the dedication to Nostra Signora delle Grazie and the image's long devotional history. Its annual feast on 8 September, the Nativity of Mary, includes Mass and a procession. The hamlet lies between Corniglia and Vernazza, within the connected cultural landscape of the Cinque Terre.