Virgo Lauretana

MOB 45 Virgo Lauretana

Late medieval religious traditions developed suggesting that this was the house in which the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph and Jesus) had lived while in Judea at the start of the first century AD. According to this narrative, this is the Nazareth house in which Mary had been born and brought up, received the Annunciation, conceived Jesus through the Holy Spirit, and had lived during the childhood of Christ. After Jesus’s Ascension, the house was converted into a church where the Apostles placed an altar, at which Saint Peter celebrated the first Eucharist after the Resurrection, the “Altar of the Apostles” inside the “house” being venerated as the authentic one.

Just before the final expulsion of the Christian Crusaders from the Holy Land, in order to protect it from Muslim soldiers, the house was miraculously carried by angels and initially deposited in 1291 on a hill at Tersatto (now Trsat, a suburb of Rijeka, Croatia), where an appearance of the Virgin and numerous miraculous cures attested to its sanctity. The miraculous translation of the house is said to have been confirmed by investigations made at Nazareth by messengers from the governor of Dalmatia.

As pilgrims were prey to bandits, in 1294, angels again carried it across the Adriatic Sea to the woods near Ancona (although the reasoning is not clear as to why this happened); from these woods (Latin lauretum, Italian Colle dei Lauri or from the name of its proprietress Laureta) the chapel derived the name which it still retains (Lat. sacellum gloriosæ Virginis in Laureto). The house that gave rise to the title Our Lady of Loreto, applied to the Virgin.

It was afterward removed in 1295 to a hill near Recanati, but being too close to the sea and therefore exposed to the dangers of Turkish raids, after eight months to a hill a mile away, Monte Prodo, near Loreto. Here two counts sought to acquire title to the land in order to profit from the pilgrimages. One in 1296, the Santa Casa is moved for the fifth time to the road that goes from Recanati to Porto Recanati, and therefore not on private property.