Museo storico Ghislieri del Santuario

Behind Vicoforte's dome, a quieter historical museum founded in the 1960s gathers what centuries of pilgrimage accumulated: votive gifts, vestments, liturgical objects and building-campaign documents, kept in rooms hidden above the basilica's chapels.

Why it matters

Great shrines are usually understood through their architecture; the Ghislieri museum explains them through their use. Its core is the material testimony of ordinary devotion — the objects carried, given and left at the Madonna di Vico by generations of pilgrims who believed the image on the pillar had changed their lives. Read alongside the documents of the construction site, the collection turns the sanctuary from a monumental ensemble into a continuous human story running from the 1590s to the 20th century.

The museum also commemorates a specifically Piedmontese ecclesiastical history. It was created in 1966 for the fourth centenary of the election of Cardinal Antonio Michele Ghislieri as Pope Pius V, who had served as bishop of Mondovì from 1560 to 1566 — a direct link between the local diocese and one of the defining figures of the 16th-century Church.

What to notice

The museum occupies rooms in the attics above the sanctuary's chapels, an intimate setting for a collection of votive and liturgical objects. Within it, three groups stand out.

The first is votive material, the museum's strongest body: gifts offered in fulfilment of vows to the Madonna, an abundance that shows how intense and long-lived devotion to the Madonna di Vico, "Regina Montis Regalis", actually was. The second is the documentation of the sanctuary's origins and construction — records that complement the building itself, from the earliest decisions around the pilone to the long decades of the dome. The third consists of sacred vestments and liturgical objects, pieces that survived the sales and dispersals that depleted the sanctuary's treasure over the centuries. Their survival is itself the story: much was lost, and what remains was deliberately rescued.

Context and history

The museum owes its existence to an anniversary and to one priest's persistence. In 1966 the diocese marked four hundred years since Antonio Michele Ghislieri — bishop of Mondovì before his election as Pius V — ascended to the papacy, and the sanctuary decided to give its scattered historical material a home under the Ghislieri name. The collection was built and maintained above all by don Enrico Nasi, prefect of the sacristy and vice-rector of the sanctuary from 1965 to 1990, whose archival work also shaped the historical archive next door.

In the final decade of the twentieth century, the museum closed after being deemed unfit for public use under accessibility and safety standards.