St. Mary's Sanctuary

A church dedicated to St. Peter Apostle was present in the territory of Porto di Legnago in the twelfth century, if not earlier. In 1111 another small church, dedicated to St. Mary of Graces, was built not far from the existing one by the Order of the Humiliated. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Dominicans replaced the Humiliated and rebuilt and enlarged St. Mary's small church. St. Peter's parish church became more and more important and famous in the seventeenth century, thanks to the veneration of a wooden statue representing Our Lady.

St. Peter's and St. Mary's churches stood next to each other until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a Napoleonic edict of 1805 decreed the closure of St. Peter's church, which was eventually demolished in 1888. The celebration of religious services, the altars and the statue representing Our Lady were transferred to the other church, which thus became the new Parish Church called Church of St. Peter and St. Paul Apostles in St. Mary.

In 1930 the statue representing Our Lady was called Our Lady of Health and the church was declared a Marian Sanctuary. In 1944 a war bomb hit and completely destroyed the church. Only the bell tower (used at present time by the new parish church which doesn't have one) and the statue representing Our Lady (previously shut away by some parishioners) were spared. After the war the church was rebuilt a hundred metres far from the place of the destroyed building. The works started in 1947 and ended in 1955. Between 1960 and 1970 a central plan chapel was built, designed to keep the statue representing Our Lady of Health.

Nowadays the church looks like this: the exterior is fully made of cotto brickwork with a big pronaos designed to protect the three doorways. The rectangular plan interior has three naves. The frescoes and graffiti painted on the main nave and in the apse basin are remarkable and multicoloured: this decoration was made by father Ugolino from Belluno in recent times. Inside the chapel of Our Lady of Health, next to the church, the paiting representing the Virgin and Child is being highly admired: this is a fifteenth century work of the artist Ranuccio Arvari.