Irene Galandra Cooper is a PhD student at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and a member of the research project funded by the European Research Council, Domestic Devotions the Place of Piety in the Renaissance Italian Home, 1400-1600. She writes here about the shrines of the Annunciation at Nazareth and Loreto.
Grotto of the Annunciation, Nazareth
In Nazareth, the Lower Basilica of the Church of the Annunciation hosts the holy site of the ‘grotto of the Virgin’ – believed to be the place where the Angel appeared to Mary and announced that she was to become the Mother of God. The altar in the grotto bears a Latin inscription: Verbum caro hic factum est. These words include a significant addition to the phrase from the Gospel of John: hic, or ‘here’.
When pilgrims to Nazareth read the inscription as they meditate on the miracle of the Incarnation, they stand where it all began: hic is a powerful, unique, site-indicator. Of Mary’s little house, however, only hewed rock remains. According to a late thirteenth-century legend, the rest of the bricks were miraculously transported from the Holy Land by angels to protect it after the Muslim defeat of the Crusaders. The house settled first in Dalmatia and then, in 1294, came to rest at Loreto, a hilltop town near Ancona, on the Adriatic coast of Italy.
In Loreto, as in Nazareth, a multitude of devotees come to kneel in front of the medieval altar built within the little room, which bears the same Latin inscription: Hic Verbum caro factum est. Now moved to a prime position at the beginning of the phrase, hic is more emphatic, drawing the faithful into an even stronger bond with the place where the words are read, and in turn, with the place where the Word became flesh.
The apparently contradictory existence of two places where the Word was made flesh may remind the faithful of what follows in the rest of the verse: Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis – the Word is always ‘here’, because as flesh God ‘dwelt amongst us’.
The Holy House, Loreto