Santuario di Grun

High on the hillside above Saint-Vincent, the Sanctuary of Grun is an eighteenth-century Marian chapel associated with its annual patronal feast. Its painted ex-votos and a portico fresco attributed to Italo Mus give this modest building a distinctive place in the valley's devotional memory.

Why it matters

The Sanctuary of Grun is the most personal of Saint-Vincent's religious monuments. It was founded as a pilgrimage place by a country priest who worked with families of two hillside hamlets, where people gave thanks for recovered health and answered prayers. The interior walls are covered with ex-voto paintings left by the faithful beside a painted Via Crucis, reflecting the chapel's role in rural Alpine devotion.

What to notice

The recessed entrance forms a small portico with a fresco of the Virgin welcoming pilgrims. The chapel has a single nave, choir, sacristy and cantoria, following an 1864 enlargement of the 1727 core. On the masonry altar, framed by four columns, a statue of the Madonna in walnut wood now stands where a large painting of Mary once hung; the original was stolen in 1992 and the replacement was given by a devotee.

Context and history

The sanctuary goes back to the initiative of Pierre Bréan, a priest who had served as deputy parish priest of Saint-Vincent between 1705 and 1713 and remained a devout promoter of Marian worship. Around 1720 he conceived the idea of a chapel on the hill of Grun, and an agreement of 1725 put the project on a firm footing: the inhabitants of Grun and Valmignana were to provide the land and the materials, while Bréan paid for the work and furnished the chapel. The building was completed in 1727, and among those present at the inaugural feast was the abbot Jean-Baptiste Perret — the same man who in 1770 would identify the mineral spring that turned Saint-Vincent into a thermal resort town. The chapel was enlarged in 1864 to its present form. Pilgrimage processions once climbed here regularly from the village below, including a late-May procession and a "rain procession" held to ask for rain, or for its cessation. The chapel's patronal feast remains part of its devotional history.