Santuario della Madonna delle Lacrime

A Renaissance sanctuary among the olive groves south of Trevi was built after reports in 1485 that a painted image of the Madonna had wept. Its Cappella dei Magi contains Perugino's signed Adoration of the Magi, dated 1522, alongside works by Giovanni di Pietro, called lo Spagna, and Orazio Alfani.

Why it matters

According to the regional account, Diotallevi di Antonio commissioned a Madonna and Child fresco for a rural house near the road to Spoleto in 1483. Witnesses reported that the image wept on 5 August 1485. The devotion prompted the commune and local families to fund a church, begun in 1487 and completed in 1522. The sanctuary preserves a late work by Pietro Vannucci, known as Perugino, signed in 1522.

What to notice

The church has a Latin-cross plan, a tall nave lit by large windows and cross vaults. The Cappella dei Magi, also called the chapel of the Nativity or Epiphany, contains Perugino's signed Adoration of the Magi, flanked by Saints Peter and Paul. A coat of arms of the Valenti family appears in the arch. The right transept's polychrome marble altar encloses the original 1483 image of the Madonna. In the left transept, Giovanni di Pietro, called lo Spagna, painted the Transport of Christ to the Sepulchre in 1520; the church also contains a chapel of San Carlo Borromeo and an Adoration/Resurrection chapel by Orazio Alfani. Funerary monuments of the Valenti family line the nave.

Context and history

Francesco da Pietrasanta drew up the sanctuary's design on 27 November 1485. Construction began in 1487 and was completed in 1522. Giovanni di Giampietro da Venezia carved the facade portal in 1495; the original cornice was partly destroyed in the 1703 earthquake. The convent passed from the Lateran Canons Regular to the Liguorini. From 1935 it housed the medical-pedagogical institute founded by Beato Pietro Bonilli. The 1997 earthquake damaged the church; it reopened provisionally in 2004 and definitively in 2006 after restoration.