Santuario di Nostra Signora delle Grazie

At 390 metres, among the stone houses of San Bernardino, stands the whitewashed sanctuary of Nostra Signora delle Grazie, overlooking Corniglia. The church is young, built at the start of the twentieth century, but its devotion is old — a chapel has stood here since at least 1584.

Why it matters

The sanctuary stands among the heights above the Cinque Terre villages, overlooking Corniglia and the terraces below. It forms part of the ring of sanctuaries associated with each borgo.

The building tells an unusual story in stone. A chapel on the site is attested from 1584; by the eighteenth century the image inside had become the object of a legend the park still recounts: when Corniglia's people went up to restore the painting of the Madonna, they found it miraculously intact, its colours undimmed. The image was solemnly crowned in 1874. Growth of devotion, not decay, drove the last rebuilding — the present church was raised at the beginning of the twentieth century to replace the old chapel.

The sanctuary lies within a historic network connecting Vernazza and Corniglia with Reggio and the ridge toward Cigoletta.

What to notice

The church stands among San Bernardino's hillside houses, part of a small hamlet raised on rock and grouped around its religious buildings. Together, the houses and sanctuary form a distinctive settlement at 390 metres.

The sanctuary centres on an image of the Madonna, which an eighteenth-century restoration reportedly found intact. Its coronation in 1874 marks the history of that devotion. A fountain stands at the church entrance, overlooking the Corniglia terraces, which rise toward 400 metres.

Context and history

The sanctuary's documented timeline is compact and verifiable: a chapel attested by 1584, serving the scattered farms and shepherds of the mountain above Corniglia; the crowned image by 1874, the mark of formalised diocesan devotion; the present church at the opening of the twentieth century, built on the mountainside when the old chapel no longer matched the cult's importance. Together, these phases make the sanctuary one of the better-documented small religious sites in the park.

The sanctuary lies within the commune of Vernazza, like the neighbouring sanctuary of Reggio, and the two are linked by a path. The sanctuaries formed a network among themselves as well as connecting villages with their devotional sites. The high road past San Bernardino was an old connection between the upper lands of the villages, from vineyards near Corniglia to chestnut and oak groves beyond.