Basilica della Santa Casa

The "house" itself consists of three stone walls.[4][5] It is a plain stone structure, with a door on the north side and a window on the west.[5] The size is 31 13 feet, i.e. 9 x 4 m[6] (or 8.5 m by 3.8 m and 4.1 m high).

The "house" contains the "Altar of the Apostles", venerated as the authentic one built by St Peter and the Apostles.[5]

A niche contains a 33 inches high[7] black image of the Virgin and Child, a statue made of Lebanon cedar, richly adorned with jewels, placed above the altar.[6] A legend attributes the statue to Saint Luke, described in the Bible a physician, with a later tradition adding painting to his skills, and here given also the attribute of a sculptor; but its style suggests it was created in the 15th century.[6][8]

The "Black Madonna", known as Our Lady of Loreto, owes its dark colour to centuries of lamp smoke and is carved from Cedar of Lebanon. Much like the Holy House, it is associated with miracles.[9] The statue was commissioned after a fire in the Santa Casa in 1921 destroyed the original madonna, and it was granted a Canonical Coronation in 1922 by Pope Pius XI. In October 2019 Pope Francis restored the feast of Our Lady of Loreto, commemorated on December 10, to the universal Roman calendar.[4]

Around the house is a tall marble screen designed by Bramante and executed under Popes Leo X, Clement VII and Paul III, by Andrea Sansovino, Girolamo Lombardo, Bandinelli, Guglielmo della Porta and others in the baroque style. The four sides represent the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Arrival of the Santa Casa at Loreto and the Nativity of the Virgin, respectively.

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, and which was miraculously flown over to Europe by four angels just before the final expulsion of the Christian Crusaders from the Holy Land, in order to protect it from Muslim soldiers. 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.[4]

The tradition holds that after Jesus's Ascension, the house was converted into a church where the Apostles placed an altar, at which Saint Peter, considered by Catholics to be the first Pope, celebrated the first Eucharist after the Resurrection, the "Altar of the Apostles" inside the "house" being venerated as the authentic one.[5]

In 336, Empress Helena made a pilgrimage to Nazareth and allegedly directed that a basilica be erected over it, in which worship continued until the fall of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.[6] However, there is no firm historical evidence that Helena did in fact make such an intervention.

The narrative further states that, threatened with destruction by Muslim soldiers, the house was miraculously carried by angels through the air 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. In 1294, angels again carried it across the Adriatic Sea to the woods near Recanati (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). From this spot it was afterwards removed to the present hill in 1295, with a slight adjustment being required to fix it in its current site. It is this house that gave rise to the title Our Lady of Loreto, sometimels applied to the Virgin; the miracle is occasionally represented in religious art wherein the house is borne by an angelic host.

A more detailed narrative mentions five transitions: in May 1291 from Nazareth to Tersatto, where it remained for over three years; from there to the other side of the Adriatic Sea, to Posatora (now part of Ancona) in the Marche region; after nine months to woods near Recanati in Marche; after eight months to a hill a mile away, Monte Prodo, near Loreto, where local counts petition the pope for ownership of the pilgrimage site; and finally, at the end of 1296, to the current position on the road then connecting Recanati to Porto Recanati, on public ground free of property claims.[5]

Analysis by Italian archaeologists and architects reached the conclusion that the Holy House[5]

• is built of two types of limestone found in Nazareth, but not in Loreto and Marche - as is the "Altar of the Apostles"[5]
• the mortar between the stones is typical for 1st century Palestine, but not for Italy[5]
• the graffiti on the walls are similar and contemporary to those discovered at the Grotto of the Annunciation in Nazareth[5]
• the "house" has no foundations, stands directly on dusty ground not cleared in any way and containing snail shells, acorns and a dried walnut, and even stands atop a thorny bush[5]
• the three-wall "house" fits exactly the measurements of the foundations excavated in front of the Grotto in Nazareth, and those of the "missing" wall fit the Grotto, therefore:[5]
• the Holy House and the Grotto were originally part of the same dwelling.[5]
• The Holy House is placed partly on a public road connecting Recanati with Porto Recanati, its apparition forcing the magistrates of Recanati to build a diversion of the road - this makes an intentional construction at such a location look improbable[5]
• the survival of the three-wall structure lacking foundations and placed partly on a road, partly over a ditch, defies the laws of physics.[5]

In modern times, the Church traced the linguistic origins of the story to an aristocratic family called "Angelos", which were responsible for the transfer.[15] There are 16th century bas-reliefs, which suggest that the Holy House was transported by sea.[16] In May 1900, papal physician Giuseppe Lapponi indicated that he had read in the Vatican archives documents suggesting that the members of the noble Byzantine family named Angelos had saved the stones of the House from Muslim devastation and transported them to Loreto.[17] In a second step, in late 1294, Nikephoros, ruler of Epirus from the Angelos family (in Italian: Niceforo Angeli), sent on the bricks to Italy as a wedding gift for his daughter who had married Prince Philip, the son of the King of Naples, in October that year.[16] In both Greek and Latin, the family name Angelos/Angeli means "angels".[18] The stones considered by researchers to be authentic are still visibly marked with Roman numerals, by scratching or with coal, which suggest that the three walls were carefully taken apart with the intention to faithfully reassemble them at another location, which actually happened.[19] The traditional date of the miraculous translation, 12th May 1291, is compatible with the historical dates - the port city of Acre, the Crusader capital, fell six days later, theoretically allowing for the shipment of the stones, once they had been carried by cart from Nazareth to the port of Acre.[19]

Archaeological excavations were carried out in 1962-65.[19] Among the numerous coins found underneath the building, there were two bearing the inscription "Gui Dux Atenes".[19] Meant is Guy II de la Roche, the Regent of Athens from 1280 to 1287.[19] His parents were the Frankish nobleman, William I, Duke of Athens, and Aromanian Greek princess Helena Angelina Komnene, the daughter of John Doukas, Prince of Thessaly, also known as John Angelos.[19] Through his mother, Guy was related to the Byzantine families of the Komnenos and Doukas, Emperors of Constantinople and Epirus.[19] Helena was Regent of the Duchy of Athens from the death of her husband in 1287 until her son's reaching the age of majority in 1294, covering the entire time span of the translation of the Holy House from Nazareth, to Epirus, to Recanati (Loreto).[19] The presence of the two coins are proof that the Angelos family, known in Italian as Angeli and later as De Angeli, supervised the event.[19] The law of Recanati categorically prohibited construction of any type of building on public roads, providing for its immediate demolition; only an intervention from a very high authority could have lead to a suspension of the law, as it obviously happened in the case of the House.[19] Archaeological examination offered further proof for both the provenance of the stones from Nazareth, and for them being reassembled at Loreto, where several phases of support construction for the three-wall structure could be detected.[19]

The documented history of the house can only be traced as far back as the close of the Crusades, around the 14th century. An early brief reference is made in the Italia Illustrata of Flavius Blondus (1392–1463), secretary to Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V, Calixtus III and Pius II; it can be read in its entirety in the Redemptoris mundi Matris Ecclesiæ Lauretana historia, by a certain Teremannus, contained in the Opera Omnia (1576) of Baptista Mantuanus.

According to Herbert Thurston, in some respects the Lauretan tradition is "beset with difficulties of the gravest kind", which were noted in a 1906 work on the subject. There are documents which indicate that a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin already existed at Loreto in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that is, 180 years before the time of the supposed translation; and there is no mention of the supposed miraculous translation of the Holy House in 1472. Thurston notes that papal confirmations of the Loreto tradition are relatively late (the first Bull mentioning the translation is that of Julius II in 1507), but that they are at first very guarded in expression, for Julius introduces the clause "ut pie creditur et fama est", "as is piously believed and reported to be".[20]

Thurston suggests that a miracle-working statue or picture of the Madonna was brought from Tersatto in Illyria (more precisely: Dalmatia) to Loreto by some pious Christians and was then confounded with the ancient rustic chapel in which it was harboured, the veneration formerly given to the statue afterwards passing to the building.[20]

Finally, Thurston draws comparisons to the shrine at Walsingham, the principal English shrine of the Blessed Virgin, the legend of "Our Lady's house" (written down about 1465, and consequently earlier than the Loreto translation tradition) supposes that in the time of St. Edward the Confessor a chapel was built at Walsingham, which exactly reproduced the dimensions of the Holy House of Nazareth. When the carpenters could not complete it upon the site that had been chosen, it was transferred and erected by angels' hands at a spot two hundred feet away.[21]