Italy Pilgrimage Sites Beyond Rome

1. Why Italy Beyond Rome Is Worth the Detour

Italy outside Rome is covered with working shrines, and the reason is historical rather than sentimental. Christianity reached the peninsula in the apostolic generation and never left it. Every wave since then, the monastic movement of the sixth century, the mendicant explosion of the thirteenth, the Counter-Reformation, the nineteenth-century founders of teaching orders, laid down another set of tombs and another set of towns built around them. Rome accumulated the graves of the two apostles and the papal churches. The rest of the peninsula accumulated almost everything else.

A pilgrim who spends a week only in Rome sees the centre of the Church's government and the memory of the martyrs. Our guide to the papal basilicas, the catacombs and the seven pilgrim churches of Rome covers that ground in full, and St Peter's Basilica and the tomb beneath it has its own page. The country beyond the city offers something the city does not: small towns whose whole existence is organised around one grave, where the pilgrim traffic is Italian, where the sacristan knows the relic personally, and where the object of veneration is a few feet away rather than behind glass at the end of a queue.

The geography also cooperates. Assisi sits two hours from Rome. Orvieto is an hour and a half. Loreto and Lanciano are on opposite ends of the Adriatic side of the same road network. Turin, Milan, Padua and Venice are strung along the country's main high-speed rail line. San Giovanni Rotondo and Monte Sant'Angelo are twenty minutes apart on the same limestone spur. Italy rewards a pilgrim who picks a region and works it slowly.

One caution runs through the whole guide. Italian shrines change their opening rhythms constantly, and a Eucharistic relic or a saint's tomb is often accessible only around scheduled Masses. Nothing on this page carries times, prices or timetables, because those rot within a season. Check the sanctuary's own published information in the week before you travel, and build the day around a Mass rather than around a viewing.

If you want the underlying theology of the practice before the geography, our page on what a pilgrimage is in Catholic teaching covers the penitential and devotional roots, and the global overview of Christian pilgrimage sites puts Italy in the wider frame alongside the Holy Land, Spain and Poland.

2. The Ten Shrines Most Pilgrims Come For

Ten places recur on almost every organised Catholic pilgrimage to Italy outside Rome. The table below is the shortlist, with the reason each one draws people and the region it sits in. Every entry is expanded later in this guide.

Notice how the list splits. Four are saints' tombs. Two are Marian shrines. Two are Eucharistic. One is an angelic sanctuary. One is a relic of the Passion. That range is the reason Italy can carry a whole pilgrimage on its own, and it also explains why an itinerary that treats them as ten equivalent stops feels flat by the fourth day. They ask for different kinds of prayer.

The second rank most itineraries skip

Behind the ten stand Orvieto with the corporal of Bolsena, Siena with the head of Catherine, Subiaco and Montecassino with the cradle and the grave of Benedict, Norcia where he was born, La Verna where Francis received the stigmata, Greccio where he built the first Nativity scene, Amalfi and Salerno with the relics of two of the Twelve, Venice with the body venerated as St Mark, Milan with Ambrose and Charles Borromeo, Bologna with Dominic, Manoppello with its veil, Syracuse with a Marian sanctuary built over a lacrimation, and Nettuno with the remains of a twelve-year-old martyr. Several of these are better prayed than the famous ten, because the crowds have not found them.

3. Assisi and the Umbrian Valley

Assisi is the town most Italian pilgrimages outside Rome are built around, and it holds the bodies of two of the most influential saints in the Church's history within a few hundred metres of each other. Francis died in 1226 and was canonised in 1228; Clare died in 1253 and was canonised in 1255. The town has been organised around their memory for eight centuries, and it is compact enough to walk end to end in half an hour.

The Basilica of San Francesco

The basilica was begun in 1228, the year of the canonisation, and it is built in two churches stacked on one another with the tomb underneath. The lower church is low, dim and Romanesque in feeling, decorated by Cimabue and by Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti. The upper church is tall and Gothic and carries the fresco cycle of the life of Francis long attributed to Giotto, a set of twenty-eight scenes whose authorship art historians still argue about. Below both, reached by stairs from the lower nave, is the crypt where the body was rediscovered in 1818 after centuries hidden under the high altar to protect it from theft. Four of his early companions are buried at the corners of the crypt.

Pilgrims frequently miss that the crypt is the point. The frescoes are the reason art historians come. The grave is the reason the church exists. Go down first, kneel, and come back up to the paintings afterwards.

Santa Chiara and the San Damiano crucifix

The Basilica of Santa Chiara, pink and white striped and built on the edge of the hill, holds the body of Clare in the crypt and the painted crucifix that spoke to Francis at San Damiano, moved into the basilica for safekeeping. The crucifix is a twelfth-century Umbrian panel in the Syrian style, and standing in front of it is standing in front of the object at which Francis heard the command to repair the Church.

San Damiano, the Porziuncola and the Carceri

Three sites outside the walls complete the picture. San Damiano, downhill through olive groves, is the small church Francis physically rebuilt and where Clare and her sisters lived for forty years; her dormitory and the spot where she died are still shown. The Porziuncola is the tiny chapel Francis restored and made the mother house of the order, now standing inside the enormous basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli on the plain, an arrangement that startles every first-time visitor. The Eremo delle Carceri, up Mount Subasio in the woods, is where the friars went to pray alone, and it is the quietest place in the district.

The Portiuncula Indulgence, popularly the Pardon of Assisi, is attached to the Porziuncola and to parish churches under the usual conditions each 2 August. Conditions for any indulgence are set out in the Church's Enchiridion Indulgentiarum and include sacramental confession, Eucharistic communion and prayer for the intentions of the Holy Father.

Carlo Acutis

Assisi has become a destination for a younger generation because of Carlo Acutis, the teenager who died of leukaemia in 2006 and whose body rests in the Sanctuary of the Renunciation, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Assisi, dressed in jeans and trainers. His exhibition on Eucharistic miracles is the reason many pilgrims first hear of Lanciano and Orvieto at all. Our dedicated guide to the Assisi basilicas and Franciscan sites walks the town church by church, and our page on visiting the tomb of Carlo Acutis in Assisi covers the church, the body and how the visit fits alongside the Franciscan sites, and the biography sits at St Carlo Acutis.

For the saints themselves, see St Francis of Assisi and the stigmata and St Clare of Assisi and the Poor Clares.

La Verna and Greccio

Two Franciscan sites outside Umbria complete the story and almost never appear on a coach itinerary. La Verna, on a wooded crag in Tuscany above the Casentino valley, is where Francis received the stigmata in September 1224, two years before his death; the chapel of the stigmata is built over the spot and the friars still process there daily. Greccio, in the Rieti valley of Lazio, is where at Christmas 1223 Francis arranged a manger with an ox and an ass and had Mass celebrated there, the origin of every Nativity scene since. Both are mountain sanctuaries reached on small roads, and both are places where a pilgrim can be alone.

4. Cascia, Roccaporena and Norcia

Cascia in eastern Umbria is the shrine of St Rita, and it draws a particular kind of pilgrim: people carrying situations that look closed. Rita was married against her inclination, widowed by a killing, lost her two sons, and was refused entry to the Augustinian monastery at Cascia three times before being admitted. She lived there until 1457 and received a wound on her forehead described in her tradition as a thorn from the crucifix. She was canonised in 1900 and is invoked for impossible causes.

The basilica and the body

The Basilica of Santa Rita was completed in the 1940s and is startlingly modern for an Italian shrine, with heavy stone and strong colour. Rita's body lies in a glass case in a side chapel, vested in the Augustinian habit, and the queue moves slowly because people stop and stay. The traditional devotion is the blessing of roses on her feast, 22 May, and letters of petition left at the shrine. Roccaporena, a few kilometres up the valley, is the hamlet where she was born and married, and it has her house, the rock where she prayed, and a great deal of silence.

The same church holds the Eucharistic relic of Cascia, traced to 1330, when a priest carrying a consecrated host carelessly in a breviary is said to have found the page stained with blood. The stained page is kept in a reliquary. See St Rita of Cascia and impossible causes for the life in full.

Norcia

Norcia, thirty minutes north over a pass, is the birthplace of Benedict and his twin sister Scholastica, born there around the year 480. The basilica built over the traditional site of the family house was destroyed in the earthquake of 30 October 2016, which levelled much of the town centre, and reconstruction has been under way since. Pilgrims should check the state of the basilica and the monastic community before travelling, because the situation on the ground has moved repeatedly since the earthquake. The town itself, walled and set under the Sibillini mountains, remains the natural first stop on a Benedictine route that ends at Montecassino.

5. Orvieto, Bolsena and Siena

Orvieto holds the corporal of Bolsena, the linen cloth at the centre of the events that led to the feast of Corpus Christi. In 1263 a Bohemian priest named Peter, according to the tradition, was celebrating Mass at the church of Santa Cristina in Bolsena while troubled by doubts about the Real Presence, and blood appeared on the corporal beneath the host. Pope Urban IV was resident at Orvieto, twenty kilometres away, and the cloth was brought to him there.

The cathedral and the Chapel of the Corporal

Orvieto's cathedral, begun in 1290, is one of the great striped Gothic facades in Italy, and it was built on a scale the small hill town could barely justify. The Chapel of the Corporal on the left of the transept holds the reliquary made in the 1330s, a silver and enamel shrine shaped like the cathedral facade itself, containing the cloth. Across the transept is the Chapel of San Brizio with Luca Signorelli's frescoes of the end of the world, painted from 1499, a cycle that influenced Michelangelo and that reads as a visual commentary on the last things. Readers interested in that subject matter can follow it in our guides to the final judgment and the end times.

On 11 August 1264 Urban IV issued the bull Transiturus de hoc mundo, extending the feast of Corpus Christi to the whole Latin Church. The connection between the bull and the Bolsena events is part of the shrine's tradition; the bull itself argues the feast from the doctrine of the Eucharist. Thomas Aquinas, who was at the papal court at Orvieto in those years, is traditionally credited with composing the office and hymns for the feast, including Pange Lingua and Lauda Sion. See St Thomas Aquinas and our doctrinal page on the Real Presence in the Eucharist.

The Catholic Church has defined the doctrine of the Real Presence, and it has never defined the authenticity of any particular Eucharistic miracle as an article of faith. Approved public veneration of a relic such as the corporal of Bolsena permits and encourages the devotion; it makes no ruling that binds a Catholic to believe the events as narrated.

Siena

Siena is the city of Catherine, the Dominican tertiary who wrote the Dialogue, badgered Gregory XI into returning the papacy from Avignon to Rome in 1377, and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970. Her body lies in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, and her head and a thumb were returned to Siena and are venerated in the Basilica of San Domenico, in a chapel with frescoes of her ecstasies. Downhill from the basilica, the Sanctuary of Santa Caterina occupies her family house, with the dyer's workshop of her father and the small room where she slept. See St Catherine of Siena and the pope.

The church of San Francesco in Siena keeps a second Eucharistic relic: a set of consecrated hosts stolen in 1730 and recovered days later in an offertory box, which have been kept since and are exposed periodically. The unusual claim is preservation over centuries rather than any change of appearance.

6. Loreto and the Holy House

Loreto in the Marche is built around the Santa Casa, a small rectangular stone room without foundations enclosed inside an enormous basilica. The house has been venerated since the end of the thirteenth century as the dwelling of the Holy Family at Nazareth, the room of the Annunciation, and it drew pilgrims from across Europe through the medieval and early modern centuries.

What the tradition says and what the Church has defined

The traditional account, first written down in the fifteenth century, is that the house was carried by angels from Nazareth to Illyria and then to the laurel grove at Loreto in 1294, as the crusader states collapsed. Later research has pointed in a different direction: the stones and mortar have been compared with Nazareth building technique, graffiti of a Judaeo-Christian character have been reported on them, and documents have been produced connecting the transfer with the Angeli family of Epirus, whose surname would supply an ordinary explanation for the angels of the legend. Nazareth itself preserves a grotto beneath the Basilica of the Annunciation, and the two traditions describe different parts of the same dwelling, the cave behind and the built room in front.

The Church has defined none of this. What the Church has done is approve and promote the devotion. Popes have visited Loreto repeatedly across five centuries, the Litany of Loreto is the standard Marian litany of the Roman Rite, Benedict XV named Our Lady of Loreto patroness of air travellers in 1920, and in 2019 the Congregation for Divine Worship inscribed her optional memorial in the General Roman Calendar on 10 December. The object of the devotion is the Incarnation, the moment recorded in Luke 1:26-38 when the angel came to Mary at Nazareth.

What the visit is like

The basilica is a fortress, walled and bastioned against Ottoman raiding from the Adriatic, and it sits on a ridge with the sea visible below. Inside, the Holy House stands under the dome, sheathed in a marble screen designed in the early sixteenth century with scenes of the life of Mary, so that a pilgrim walks around a Renaissance monument and then steps through a low door into a bare stone room with a blackened statue of the Virgin at the far end. The contrast is the whole experience. Pilgrims traditionally circle the house on their knees.

Loreto pairs naturally with Assisi and Cascia on an Umbria and Marche loop, and it sits on the same Adriatic corridor as Lanciano, further south. For the wider question of what the Church says about Marian shrines and their status, see our page on approved Marian apparitions and the 2024 norms. Loreto is a shrine built on a relic tradition rather than on an apparition, and no apparition decree applies to it. Our page on the Holy House of Loreto and what the evidence shows takes the translation question apart at length.

7. Lanciano and the Eucharistic Towns

Lanciano in Abruzzo keeps a Eucharistic relic that has been venerated in the town since the Middle Ages. The tradition places the event in the eighth century, in a church served by Basilian monks, where a priest doubting whether the Body and Blood were truly present saw the host become flesh and the wine become blood during the words of consecration. The flesh and five pellets of coagulated blood have been preserved since and are displayed in a monstrance above the altar in the church of San Francesco, in a chapel a pilgrim can walk up behind to view them from close range.

The 1970s examinations

Specimens were examined in 1970 and 1971 by Odoardo Linoli, professor of anatomy and pathological histology at the hospital of Arezzo, who reported that the flesh was human striated muscular tissue of the myocardium and that the blood was human, of group AB, with proteins in the proportions found in fresh blood. The results were published and have been discussed since by both supporters and critics.

The findings above are those of Odoardo Linoli, published in Quaderni Sclavo di Diagnostica Clinica e di Laboratorio in 1971 and summarised in later Italian publications. They are the conclusions of a named investigator and not a determination of the Catholic Church, which has never defined the authenticity of any Eucharistic miracle. Catholic belief in the Real Presence rests on the words of Christ at the Last Supper and on the constant teaching of the Church, and it stands whatever any laboratory reports about any relic.

Why the Eucharistic shrines belong together

Lanciano, Orvieto, Siena and Cascia form a set. Each is a place where the Church permitted the preservation and veneration of a physical object connected with the Eucharist, and each attracts pilgrims for the same reason: the doctrine of the Real Presence is difficult, and people want to stand near something. The pastoral answer at every one of these shrines is the same. The relic is a sign given to a particular town at a particular moment. The Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle of an ordinary parish church at home is the same Lord, present in the same way, and reserved there for anyone who walks in. Our page on visiting the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano covers the shrine and the examinations on their own. Our guide to the Real Presence sets out the doctrine, and how the Church verifies miracles explains the process the Church actually uses when it investigates a claim.

8. Monte Sant'Angelo, Padre Pio and the Gargano

The Gargano promontory in northern Puglia, the spur on the boot of Italy, carries two shrines twenty minutes apart that between them draw enormous numbers of pilgrims: the cave of St Michael at Monte Sant'Angelo and the tomb of Padre Pio at San Giovanni Rotondo.

The cave of the archangel

Monte Sant'Angelo is the oldest sanctuary of St Michael in western Europe. Its tradition places apparitions of the archangel to the bishop of Siponto in the closing years of the fifth century, and the shrine consists of a natural grotto entered down a long flight of steps from a Romanesque portal, with a bronze door made in Constantinople in 1076 and installed at the entrance to the cave. Lombard kings, Norman rulers, crusaders bound for the Holy Land from the Adriatic ports, and pilgrims on the Via Francigena all came here. UNESCO inscribed the sanctuary in 2011 as part of the serial site "Longobards in Italy. Places of the Power (568-774 A.D.)".

The UNESCO inscription date and site name above are as published by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Calling Monte Sant'Angelo the oldest sanctuary of St Michael in western Europe is the sanctuary's own description of itself and the standard one in the historical literature on the Gargano cult. The dating of the earliest apparitions rests on the shrine's medieval tradition and on the eighth-century text known as the Liber de apparitione Sancti Michaelis in Monte Gargano.

The cave is cold, irregular, and unlike any other major Italian shrine, because the sanctuary is the rock itself and no architect ever regularised it. Devotion to Michael as the defender in spiritual conflict is anchored in Revelation 12:7-9 and Jude 9, and our pages on St Michael the Archangel, angels in Catholic teaching and spiritual warfare carry that further.

San Giovanni Rotondo

Padre Pio, the Capuchin who bore the stigmata from 1918 until his death in 1968 and who spent decades hearing confessions, lived at the friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie at San Giovanni Rotondo. The site now has three churches: the sixteenth-century friary church, the larger church built in 1959, and the very large modern church designed by Renzo Piano and completed in 2004 to hold the crowds. Padre Pio's body is in a crypt beneath the Piano church.

What pilgrims should look for is the small things. The old confessional where he sat for hours, the cell, the choir loft where he celebrated Mass, and the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the hospital he founded and pushed into existence in a poor mountain town. The hospital is the argument against reading him as a curiosity. He was canonised in 2002. Our page on the Padre Pio shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo covers the three churches, the crypt and the friary in detail. See St Padre Pio the stigmatist for the life, the phenomena and the periods when the Holy Office restricted his public ministry, which are part of the record and are often left out.

Doing the Gargano well

The two shrines are usually done in a single day from a base in Manfredonia or San Giovanni Rotondo itself, and Bari is about two hours south. The three together make a compact Puglian pilgrimage of three or four days, with the Romanesque cathedrals of Trani, Barletta and Bitonto on the coast road between them.

9. Sacra di San Michele and the Shrines of the Archangel

The Sacra di San Michele is an abbey planted on the summit of Mount Pirchiriano in the Val di Susa in Piedmont, west of Turin, on the road that crosses to France. It was founded around the end of the tenth century, grew into a powerful Benedictine house, and is reached by a long climb and then by an interior staircase cut through the rock, the Scalone dei Morti, that opens into the church at the top. The regional government of Piedmont designated it the symbolic monument of the region by law in 1994, and Umberto Eco is generally said to have drawn on it for the setting of The Name of the Rose.

Sacra di San Michele belongs with Monte Sant'Angelo in devotion rather than geography. Both are Michael sanctuaries built on high rock, and popular tradition links them, along with Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy and other Michael sites, in a line running across Europe. That alignment is a devotional idea rather than a teaching of the Church, and this site does not build arguments on it. What is true and useful is simpler: the western Church consistently put its shrines of the archangel on heights and in caves, and the pattern says something about how Michael has been understood, as the guardian at the frontier.

Piedmont adds a third Michael site of a different kind at the Abbey of Novalesa nearby, and a pilgrim crossing from France into Italy on foot passes all of them.

10. Bari, Amalfi and Salerno: Apostolic Tombs of the South

Southern Italy holds three major relic shrines acquired in the same era and by the same method: relics carried west from the eastern Mediterranean by Italian maritime cities during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Bari has Nicholas, Amalfi has Andrew, Salerno has Matthew.

Bari and St Nicholas

Nicholas was bishop of Myra in Lycia in the fourth century, and his tomb there was a major pilgrimage site for seven centuries. In 1087, with Myra under Seljuk control, sailors from Bari removed the relics and brought them home, landing on 9 May. The Basilica di San Nicola was raised over the new tomb and Pope Urban II consecrated the crypt in 1089. Venetian sailors took further relics from Myra during the First Crusade, and Venice keeps its own claim at San Nicolò al Lido.

The crypt at Bari is a forest of columns with the tomb under the altar, and it matters ecumenically. Nicholas is venerated with great intensity across the Orthodox world, and Bari receives Orthodox pilgrims in large numbers; an Orthodox chapel operates in the crypt and Orthodox liturgies are celebrated there. Each 9 May a clear liquid known as the manna is drawn from the tomb and distributed. The city keeps the feast with a procession that puts the statue out to sea and brings it back.

Because the shrine sits at a meeting point, it is worth knowing who is meeting. The Eastern Orthodox Churches are the communion of autocephalous Churches including the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Church of Greece, the Russian Orthodox Church and others, separated from Rome in the events surrounding 1054. See the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Great Schism of 1054 and Catholic ecumenism. The Oriental Orthodox Churches, meaning the Coptic, Armenian Apostolic, Ethiopian, Syriac and Malankara Churches, are a separate communion that is not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox and separated earlier, after Chalcedon in 451. The life of the saint is at St Nicholas, the real Santa Claus.

Amalfi and St Andrew

Amalfi cathedral holds relics venerated as those of the apostle Andrew, brought from Constantinople in 1208 by Cardinal Pietro Capuano, a native of the city, after the Fourth Crusade sacked it. The relics lie in the baroque crypt beneath the cathedral, reached from the top of a steep flight of steps above the piazza. As at Bari, a liquid called the manna of St Andrew is reported at the tomb and collected. Andrew is the brother of Peter and the first-called of the apostles in John 1:35-42, and he is the patron of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which gives the Amalfi shrine an ecumenical dimension of its own.

Salerno and St Matthew

Salerno cathedral, half an hour along the coast, holds relics venerated as those of Matthew the evangelist, brought to the city in the tenth century and placed in the crypt when the cathedral was built under the Norman ruler Robert Guiscard and consecrated in 1084 in the presence of Pope Gregory VII, who died in Salerno the following year and is buried in the same cathedral. The crypt is a low, wide, heavily frescoed space with a double altar so that Mass can be said on either side of the tomb.

Relic traditions of this kind rest on medieval documentation and continuous local cult. The Catholic Church permits and regulates the veneration of relics and has not defined the authenticity of individual apostolic relics as an article of faith. Veneration is directed to God and to the saint, and its value does not depend on the outcome of any historical enquiry.

11. Pompeii, Nettuno and the Shrines Near Naples

The Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary at Pompeii stands beside the excavated Roman city, and it exists because of one man. Bartolo Longo was a lawyer from Puglia who as a student in Naples had been involved in spiritualism and anticlerical circles, returned to Catholic practice, and from 1872 began preaching the Rosary in the malarial, lawless Valle di Pompei. He acquired a damaged painting of Our Lady of the Rosary from a Naples convent, had it carried to Pompeii on a manure cart, had it restored, and built a church around it that grew into a basilica and a complex of orphanages and schools for the children of prisoners. He was beatified in 1980.

The devotion has a distinct form. The Supplica to the Queen of the Holy Rosary of Pompeii, composed by Longo, is prayed publicly twice a year, on 8 May and on the first Sunday of October, and is recited simultaneously in parishes across Italy. The shrine also popularised the Novena of Impossible Cases. Pompeii is a Marian shrine founded on a painting and a work of charity, with no apparition claim attached to it, which makes it a useful corrective to the assumption that Marian shrines begin with visions. Our pages on the Rosary and the Virgin Mary, Mother of God carry the devotion and the doctrine.

Nettuno and Maria Goretti

Nettuno, on the coast south of Rome, holds the remains of Maria Goretti in the crypt of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace. She was eleven years old when she was stabbed in 1902 by a young man on the neighbouring farm at Le Ferriere after refusing him, died the next day forgiving him, and was canonised by Pius XII in 1950. Her attacker served his sentence, testified at the process, and lived out his life doing manual work at a Capuchin friary. Her mother was present at the canonisation. The shrine is small and the story is heavy, and it is one of the few Italian shrines where the theme is forgiveness given by the victim and accepted by the offender.

Naples itself

Naples cathedral holds the reliquary of St Januarius, the fourth-century bishop and martyr whose dried blood is exposed several times a year and is reported to liquefy. The Church has permitted the veneration and the public exposition for centuries and has defined nothing about the phenomenon. Scientific explanations have been proposed and contested. Treat the liquefaction the way the Church treats it, as a devotional event surrounded by the city's affection for its patron and carrying no obligation of belief. Our page on the blood of San Gennaro in Naples sets out the history of the exposition and the state of the scientific argument. The chapel of San Severo and the catacombs of San Gennaro are within reach for pilgrims interested in the earlier Christian layers of the city.

12. Subiaco and Montecassino

Subiaco and Montecassino are the two ends of Benedict's life and the two anchors of a Benedictine pilgrimage that begins at Norcia. Benedict left his studies at Rome around the year 500, went into the hills east of the city, and lived for three years in a cave above the Anio valley at Subiaco. He gathered disciples there, founded a group of small monasteries, then moved south around 529 to the hill above Cassino, destroyed the shrine of Apollo on its summit, and founded the monastery where he wrote the Rule and where he died.

Sacro Speco

The monastery of San Benedetto at Subiaco, called the Sacro Speco or Holy Cave, is built onto a cliff face in stages, so that the visitor descends through chapel after chapel cut at different levels around the cave itself. The frescoes run from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, and one of them, in the lower church, is a portrait of Francis of Assisi painted during a visit in 1223 or 1224 without a halo and without the stigmata, and it is generally described as the earliest surviving likeness of him. Nearby, the monastery of Santa Scolastica is the only survivor of the twelve houses Benedict founded in the valley and is where the first books printed in Italy were produced in 1465.

Montecassino

Montecassino is the mother house of western monasticism and it has been destroyed four times: by the Lombards around 577, by Saracens in 883, by an earthquake in 1349, and by Allied bombing on 15 February 1944 during the battle for the Gustav Line. It was rebuilt each time on the same footprint, the last time under the slogan of the abbey itself, that it rises again. The tomb of Benedict and Scholastica lies under the high altar of the rebuilt basilica. The Polish military cemetery on the slope below, holding the men who took the ridge in May 1944, is part of what a pilgrim sees on the way up.

Benedict was proclaimed patron of Europe by Paul VI in 1964. His Rule shaped the working day of the West for a thousand years, and the medal named for him is a sacramental in wide use across the Church. See St Benedict, monasticism and the medal. Readers interested in the Eastern monastic parallel can compare the cliff monasteries of Greece in our page on the Meteora monasteries.

13. Padua, Venice and Bologna

The north east holds three cities whose principal churches are tombs, and all three are within an hour of each other by train.

Padua and St Anthony

The Basilica of St Anthony at Padua, known locally simply as Il Santo, was begun within a year of his death in 1231 and receives pilgrims in very large numbers all year. Anthony was a Portuguese Augustinian canon who joined the Franciscans, became the order's first theology teacher with Francis's approval, and preached across northern Italy until his death at thirty-five. His tomb sits in a marble chapel on the left of the nave, and the wall beside it is covered with photographs, notes and objects left by people asking his intercession, which is the part of the basilica that tells you most about how he is regarded.

Behind the high altar, the Chapel of the Relics holds the tongue, the lower jaw and the vocal apparatus, recovered when the body was examined in 1263 in the presence of Bonaventure, and displayed in gold reliquaries. Padua is also the city of Leopold Mandic, the Capuchin confessor who died in 1942 and was canonised in 1983; his tiny cell and confessional survived the bombing that flattened the church around it, and it is a short walk from the basilica. Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel, frescoed around 1305 with the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ, is on the other side of the city centre, and its frescoes are a landmark of European painting. See the Basilica of St Anthony in Padua for the church and the relic chapel in full, and St Anthony of Padua for the life.

Venice

The Basilica of St Mark holds relics venerated as those of the evangelist, brought from Alexandria by Venetian merchants in the 820s, an episode the city celebrated rather than concealed and which is depicted in the mosaics of the facade. The body lies under the high altar behind the Pala d'Oro. Mark is venerated as the founder of the Church of Alexandria by the Coptic Orthodox Church, which is Oriental Orthodox and not in communion with either Rome or the Eastern Orthodox, and in 1968 Paul VI gave a relic of St Mark to Pope Cyril VI of Alexandria for the new cathedral in Cairo, a gesture that mattered a great deal to the Coptic Church. See the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Two other Venetian churches belong on a pilgrimage. Santa Maria della Salute, the great octagonal church at the entrance to the Grand Canal, was built after a vow made by the Senate during the plague of 1630 and 1631, and the city still crosses a pontoon bridge to it each 21 November for the Festa della Salute. San Giorgio Maggiore across the water holds relics venerated as those of St Stephen. Torcello, out in the lagoon, has a cathedral founded in 639 with a Byzantine mosaic of the Last Judgment covering the west wall.

Bologna

Bologna holds the tomb of Dominic, who died in the city in 1221, in the Basilica of San Domenico. The Arca di San Domenico is a marble shrine worked on across two centuries by Nicola Pisano and his workshop, by Niccolò dell'Arca, and by the young Michelangelo, who carved three of the small figures around 1494. The complex of Santo Stefano, known as the Seven Churches, is a group of interconnected buildings assembled from late antiquity onwards in imitation of the holy places of Jerusalem, with a courtyard reproducing the Anastasis; it is one of the earliest surviving attempts in the West to build a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for people who could never go, and it is directly comparable to the arrangements described in our guides to the Via Dolorosa and virtual pilgrimage. The monastery of Corpus Domini keeps the body of Catherine of Bologna, the Poor Clare and writer who died in 1463, seated and vested. See St Dominic, founder of the Dominicans.

14. Turin, Valdocco and Milan

Turin and Milan are the two industrial capitals of the north, and both hold shrines of a very different character from the medieval hill towns.

The Shroud and the cathedral of Turin

The Shroud is kept in the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Turin, in a sealed conservation case, and it is exposed publicly only rarely, at intervals decided by the Holy See. Visitors on ordinary days see the case and a full-size photographic reproduction, along with the museum devoted to the cloth. The Church has never defined the authenticity of the Shroud. Popes have consistently spoken of it as an icon of the Passion offered to the faithful for veneration, and the historical and scientific arguments continue in both directions. Our page on the Shroud of Turin and whether you can see it sets out the exposition history and what the Church has actually said.

Valdocco and Don Bosco

Valdocco is the working-class quarter of Turin where John Bosco built his oratory for the boys of the city in the 1840s, and the Salesian sites there stand within a few minutes' walk of one another. The Basilica of Mary Help of Christians, consecrated in 1868, holds Don Bosco's tomb beneath a side altar. The complex around it preserves his rooms, the small chapel of St Francis de Sales where the oratory began, and the courtyard where the boys played. Dominic Savio, the pupil who died at fourteen in 1857 and was canonised in 1954, is venerated in the same basilica.

The Salesian work that started in that yard now runs schools and youth centres around the world, and a pilgrim standing in the courtyard is standing at its origin. Turin also holds the Sanctuary of the Consolata, the city's Marian shrine, whose Romanesque bell tower and early crypt survive beneath a baroque church, and the Little House of Divine Providence founded by Joseph Cottolengo for the destitute and the disabled, which is still running. See St John Bosco and the Salesian order and St Dominic Savio.

Milan

Milan is the city of Ambrose, and it keeps a Latin liturgical rite of its own. The Ambrosian Rite has its own calendar, its own chant, a Lent that begins on the Sunday after Ash Wednesday rather than on Ash Wednesday itself, and its own order of readings. The Second Vatican Council's constitution on the liturgy affirmed that the Church holds all lawfully recognised rites to be of equal right and dignity (Sacrosanctum Concilium 4), and the Ambrosian Rite is one of the Latin rites that survived the Roman standardisation of the sixteenth century. Attending a Sunday Mass at the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio is the simplest way to encounter it.

Sant'Ambrogio, founded by Ambrose himself in 386 over the graves of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, holds the three bodies together in a crystal case in the crypt, vested, with Ambrose in the centre. The Duomo holds the tomb of Charles Borromeo in a crypt chapel below the high altar; he was archbishop from 1564, drove the reforms of the Council of Trent through his diocese in person, and stayed in the city through the plague of 1576. High above the apse, the Nivola contains a nail venerated as one of the nails of the Crucifixion, lowered once a year in September by the archbishop in a lift-basket painted as a cloud. The church of Sant'Eustorgio holds the sarcophagus that held the relics venerated as those of the Magi until Frederick Barbarossa took them to Cologne in 1164; a portion was returned to Milan in 1904. See St Ambrose, St Charles Borromeo and our page on the Mass.

15. Manoppello, Syracuse and Objects With No Church Verdict

Several Italian shrines are built around objects on which the Church has issued no determination at all, and a pilgrim is better served knowing that in advance than discovering it from an argument on the internet afterwards. Permission to venerate is a judgement that a devotion is sound and free of error. It says nothing about the origin of the object.

Manoppello

The Holy Face of Manoppello is a small veil bearing the image of a bearded man's face with open eyes, kept above the altar of the Capuchin shrine at Manoppello in Abruzzo and visible from a walkway behind. The cloth is translucent and the image alters as the light behind it changes, which is the detail every visitor remembers. Claims have been made that it is a cloth of the Passion and that it corresponds with the Shroud of Turin. Benedict XVI made a pastoral visit to the shrine on 1 September 2006. The Church has made no ruling on the origin or nature of the image, and the shrine's permitted public veneration does not constitute one.

Syracuse

The Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Lacrime in Syracuse, Sicily, a vast concrete cone visible across the city, was built over a small plaster plaque of the Immaculate Heart of Mary that was reported to weep in a working-class household in 1953. The bishops of Sicily, meeting in December 1953, issued a statement accepting the reality of the lacrimation after examining the reports and the analysis of the collected liquid. The events at Syracuse are a lacrimation rather than an apparition, and no message or private revelation is attached to them.

The 1953 determination was made by the Sicilian bishops under the discernment practice of the time. On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, which set out six possible conclusions (nihil obstat, prae oculis habeatur, curatur, sub mandato, prohibetur et obstruitur, declaratio de non supernaturalitate) and under which the competent authority ordinarily does not declare a phenomenon supernatural. Older cases were judged under the earlier framework and the acts behind them differ from case to case. Our page on approved Marian apparitions and the 2024 norms sets this out in detail.

The Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory

The Museo delle Anime del Purgatorio occupies a corridor beside the sacristy of the church of the Sacro Cuore del Suffragio on the Lungotevere Prati in Rome, so it sits inside the city rather than beyond it, and it belongs in this section because of what it contains rather than where it is. The collection is a set of objects gathered from the nineteenth century onwards: prayer books, garments and pieces of wood and cloth carrying scorch marks in the shape of hands or fingers, each with a note describing a soul in purgatory said to have appeared to a living person and left the mark as a sign.

The Catholic Church has issued no verdict on a single object in that collection. None is an approved relic, none carries any decree, and the museum makes no official claim on the Church's behalf. What the Church teaches about purgatory stands entirely independently of the case, and it is set out in our guide to what purgatory is in Catholic teaching: the final purification of those who die in God's grace and friendship yet imperfectly purified, and the duty of the living to pray for the dead, a practice attested in 2 Maccabees 12:44-46. Visit the corridor if you are in Rome and curious. Do not build your belief on a scorched book. The obligation to pray for the dead rests on the Church's teaching and not on any of those objects, and the Rome pilgrimage guide covers the city's serious shrines.

16. Frequently Asked Questions