Chiesa di San Francesco d'Assisi (Santuario di Nostra Signora di Maralunga)

The church of San Francesco d'Assisi is both Lerici's parish church and Marian sanctuary. Rebuilt in the seventeenth century around a medieval Franciscan predecessor, it preserves the icon of the Madonna di Maralunga among works of Genoese Baroque painting.

Why it matters

The church of San Francesco d'Assisi serves as both parish church and sanctuary of the Madonna di Maralunga. The Diocese records that the church replaced a fourteenth-century predecessor and was consecrated in 1689 by bishop Giovanni Battista Spinola. Its fifteenth-century icon depicts the Virgin enthroned and standing; tradition says fishermen recovered it from a cliff on the Maralunga headland. The icon was transferred to San Francesco in 1810, and in 1980 the diocese declared the church a diocesan shrine.

What to notice

The nave contains works associated with Genoese seventeenth-century painting. Domenico Fiasella's Sant'Agostino hesitating between Christ's blood and the Virgin's milk came from the Augustinian convent at Maralunga and bears Lerici's arms. Giovanni Bernardo Carbone's Visitazione depicts the two pregnant cousins in a domestic interior. Fiasella's signed Vergine con i Santi Bernardino e Francesco dates to 1659; Jan Miel's Assunzione was painted in Rome in 1657 and given by the Botti family. Giovanni Domenico Cappellino's Immacolata dates to 1617. Other works include an octagonal baptismal font from 1448, Domenico Gar's marble triptych of 1529, Luigi Agretti's 1932 ceiling frescoes and an 1841 Agati organ.

Context and history

The medieval church was a three-aisled building; the Regione Liguria cultural-heritage census dates its baroque replacement to 1632-1636, leaving only a marble column at the head of the parvis from the older fabric. Transformations between 1765 and 1799 added the semicircular apse, and the twentieth century retouched the vaults in 1932 and rebuilt the facade in pink Ligurian stone in 1962. The census also preserves the icon's peregrinations: two panels, kept first in a purpose-built chapel, then with the Augustinian friars towards the end of the eighteenth century, before their definitive transfer to San Francesco in 1810. Since then the church has accumulated the furniture of a living sanctuary: a wooden Madonna del Rosario attributed to the school of Anton Maria Maragliano, late eighteenth-century choir stalls, and old vestments the diocese describes as of great value.