SANTUARIO MARIA SANTISSIMA DELLO SPLENDORE

Situated not far outside the wall of the Renaissance town of Giulia, on the top of a hill facing the Adriatic Sea, the church consecrated to the Holy Mary and the monastery adjoining it, founded by the Celestins friars but passed to the Capuchins in the nineteenth century, is attested as from  the beginning of the fifteenth century at least. The church, which a lot of pilgrims visit every year, was founded after a miraculous apparition of the Virgin, suffused with light and wearing the typical costume of the town, seating over an olive-tree, to a humble woodcutter named Bertolino from the near-by town of Cologna. The ancient Baroque church was destroyed and re-built in pre-Romanic forms as from the Thirties, preserving its columnated physiognomy. The inside is entirely covered with paintings representing the history of the Holy Mary and, on the high altar, preserves the little miraculous statue of the Madonna of the Splendor, beautiful wooden sculpture of the fourteenth-fifteenth century. The choir is adorned with four seventeenth-century canvases by the Neapolitan painter Giacomo Faretti, positioned over the altars of the sixteenth-century church. Inside the sacristy there is a remarkable altar-piece representing the Coronation of the Virgin, carried out by the school of the Veronese, and a tabernacle executed by the Capuchin brothers Maragoni. Inside the cloister of the convent there are the fountains which the Virgin made gush when she appeared. In the latest years the church has been adorned with a bronze Via Crucis carried out by the sculptor Ferretti, pupil of Pericle Fazzini.