Basilica of the Annunciation

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Beneath the great dome of Nazareth lies a small grotto that tradition holds to be the home of Mary, and on its altar a Latin inscription changes one word of the Gospel to say everything: Verbum caro hic factum est, here the Word was made flesh. Christians have built over this cave again and again, a Byzantine church whose mosaic still names its donor Conon, a deacon of Jerusalem, then a Crusader church whose walls remain, then the Franciscan church of 1730 after the friars returned in 1620. When that church was taken down in 1954, excavations laid bare the whole layered story, and Giovanni Muzio designed the bold two-level basilica built through the 1960s, at its completion the largest church in the Middle East, its 55-meter dome shaped like a lily turned upside down over the grotto. An octagonal opening lets the upper church gaze down into the lower one, and all around, in the nave and the courtyard, mosaics of Mary sent from dozens of nations show her with the faces of every people, for what happened here belongs to the whole world.