Santuario della Madonnetta

A sanctuary with a paradox at its heart: if you’ve stood before the grand marble facades of Genoa’s great churches, the Madonnetta feels intimate, almost domestic, yet it towers in significance beyond its size. Think of it as the opposite of a bustling, busily monumental basilica: here the drama unfolds in the scale of a chapel perched on a hillside, where a single alabaster Madonna anchors a legend that travels from a Genoese confraternity to a worldwide audience. The anonymous vantage point of the crêuza della Madonnetta places you halfway up the slope between Castelletto and Righi, and the building itself announces a deliberate Baroque poise.

Built between 1695 and 1696 for the Agostiniani Scalzi, the sanctuary was conceived under the direction of the Provençal-Italian stream of influence that flowed through architect Giovanni Antonio Ricca, known in Genoa as Ricca il Vecchio. Ricca, who was born in Imperia, designed a church whose exterior restraint belies the drama inside. The most striking architectural decision is the interior’s octagonal logic: the nave, though it reads as oval, follows an octagonal plan, and the crypt or scurolo houses the high altar flanked by the titular alabaster Madonna—the phenomenon in stone that gives the place its name.