Santuario della Madonna delle Grazie

In the historic Seuna quarter, the sanctuary of the Madonna delle Grazie joins a 1670 church with late-Gothic traces and 18th-century frescoes to a larger 1950s sanctuary. A civic tradition of votive candles recalls Nuoro’s plague vow of 1812.

Why it matters

The old church is among Nuoro’s oldest places of worship. Its importance is both artistic and civic. Artistically, it preserves one of the strongest decorative ensembles in the Nuorese: prized eighteenth-century frescoes of apostles, prophets and scenes from Scripture, painted by the Are family workshop. Civically, the sanctuary is associated with the city’s tradition of offering votive candles in thanksgiving for protection from plague. The complex also carries the memory of two of Nuoro's defining figures: Grazia Deledda, whose given name derives from this Madonna and whose name day fell on the feast, and Salvatore Satta, whose posthumous novel sets scenes here.

What to notice

Approach the old church from below: a granite staircase rises to a portal marked by a trachyte fronton with tympanum and niche, resting on an architrave with two frames and supported by two half-columns, one capital carved with zoomorphic and floral figures that find an echo in the trachyte rose window. A Latin inscription on the facade records 13 May 1670 and names the patron, Nicolao Ruju Manca, granting burial rights to him and his family — a rare chance to read a patron's bargain in stone. Along the sides, small loggias lighten the building's massive volume, and the right-hand door once led to a cloister with a large loggia that served as a pilgrims' hostel during the feast. Inside, a single barrel-vaulted nave leads to a raised square presbytery with a neoclassical altar added in the nineteenth century, and the walls carry the Are fresco cycle. The wooden devotional image is associated with the newer sanctuary nearby.

Context and history

Tradition holds that a young shepherd found a wooden statuette of the Madonna in the seventeenth century and that the image saved Nuoro from plague. The city renewed its vow to the Virgin in 1812, during an epidemic, and has continued it annually. The old church belongs to the later seventeenth century. From 1721 the Jesuits, based at Oliena, held the church, and it was they who had the walls frescoed by Pietro Antonio Are and his son Gregorio, painters active also at Orani and Fonni. On 26 January 1906 Bishop Luca Canepa granted the sanctuary the title of succursale of the cathedral. After the Second World War the Seuna district outgrew the old church: the parish of Nostra Signora delle Grazie was erected under Bishop Felice Beccaro with the community entrusted to the Oblati di San Giuseppe, the first stone of the new church was laid on 2 March 1947, and the building was blessed about ten years later, with the coronation of the Madonna following roughly another decade on.