The sanctuary of the Madonna of Loreto, born in Chiavenna in 1618, is one of the first with this dedication in Lombardy, and is relocated to the Holy House of Loreto at Recanati, in the province of Ancona, which arrived in 1294 from Tersatto, today River in Croatia. There he had arrived three years earlier from Nazareth, where he was threatened by Muslims. It would be carried by the angels, but today it is believed that it has come from Palestine by the sea by an Angeli family.

On March 12, 1618, the proximity of Dragonera, later called Loreto, decided to build a small church on the vineyard slope of the Richemont Alps. On the following 27 the archbishop Giovan Pietro Paravicini laid the first stone and on July 5 blessed the church after having donated the statue carved and painted in Milan. The original building has the same dimensions as the Santa Casa, where the Holy Family lived, preserved in the Marquis sanctuary.

 

They were difficult times for the Valchiavenna and especially for the Italian Bregaglia, one of the three smaller valleys that make it. On September 4 of that same year a landslide buried the center of Piuro, a few miles east, with its thousands of inhabitants. However, the generosity of individuals allowed the expansion of the original church, with the addition in 1625 of a chapel to the right. About ten years later, another symmetrical chapel was affixed to the latter. A central staircase went up the facade. Until the end of the century he worked to stretch the two side chapels and add a new area to the Holy House, closing the area with a three-door façade. On the left rose a slender bell tower, which was accompanied by another symmetrical only in the second half of the following century. The balcony was also built, which was completed in 1730.

 

In the Holy House, where still today the inches of the doors that closed when it was not incorporated in a larger church, the current walnut root altar, which houses the nineteenth-century statue of the Madonna with a child, is the work of At the end of six hundred of Friar Giuseppe da Molteno and came here from the church of San Giuseppe, annexed to the convent of the Capuchins of Chiavenna, suppressed, like many others, by a decree of Napoleon.

Another altar lies outside the closing wall of the Holy House with a large oil on canvas depicting the Annunciation, by Giacomo Guglielmetti of Mendrisio (1716). The same author must have the 16 canvases with episodes of the life of Our Lady, commissioned by various families of the place and now hanging along the walls of the outer church.

The existing marble altar was executed in 1797 by Gabriele Longhi of Viggiù, while the balustrade that delimits the rectangle of the presbytery and its floor is to Pietro Pirelli of Varenna (1892).

The two elegant soapstone aqueducts, located on the sides of the main entrance, date back to 1769 and 1779.

In the left chapel, the painted 1722 wooden altar comes from the church of Santa Rosalia, built during the plague of 1629-30 in Oltremera in Chiavenna and abolished in 1939. The oil painting on canvas depicts the saint among the pious, devoted Imported from local emigrants for work in Palermo.

In the chapel on the right there is a large 17th-century wooden crucifix, coming from the church of San Pietro, annexed to the convent of the Augustinian Sisters, also abolished by Napoleon in 1810.

On the right is a carved statue of Madonna, already in the outer niche at the center of the facade. Originally it could be a Sorrowful or even Madonna or a pious woman.

Among the other paintings on the left nineteenth-century, there is the transport of the Holy House and, also because of its historical importance, the ex voto on canvas of the first decades, where the church still appears with a single bell tower . It is another work to be assigned to Guglielmetti.

 

Some works from the church of Loreto date from the Treasury of the collegiate of Chiavenna: a seventeenth-century cross, donated by emigrants to Venice and two precious oils on canvas: Madonna with child between the saints Giovanni Battista and Giuseppe, purchased in 1627 for 35 Ducatons and Coronation of Our Lady from the Trinity among the saints Rocco, Sebastiano, Carlo Borromeo and Antonio Abate, attributed to the brothers Giovan Battista and Giovan Paolo Recchi of Como. In the lower right corner are portrayed the clients: Giorgio Scelter and his wife Maria Pestalozzi in Selder.

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