Basilica of San Pellegrino Laziosi

Why Go

The church people come to with a diagnosis

Come because this is where the devotion actually lives. Saint Peregrine is invoked all over the world by Catholics facing cancer, and almost none of them can reach the one place where his body is. It is not a monument. It is a parish with a shrine inside it, open morning and late afternoon, with a named weekly prayer for people carrying a tumor. Two points inside the building carry the story: the chapel where his body is preserved, and the chapter room where he is said to have prayed the night before the surgeons were to take his leg.

One church, two places

The Servants of Mary were established at Forlì in the thirteenth century, before Peregrine returned to the city as a friar, and their church of Santa Maria dei Servi is the building that stands here now. He lived, preached and heard confessions in this community, and died here in about 1345. His body was placed in an urn in the chapel on the right of the nave in 1723, three years before Benedict XIII canonized him. The chapel was rebuilt and enlarged more than once, and took its present eighteenth-century form under the architect Giuseppe Merenda. The other place is quieter and easier to walk past. At the end of the nave is the chapter room, where a painted Crucifixion of the fourteenth century, attributed to Giuliano da Rimini, still hangs. Tradition places Peregrine's night of prayer before that image, and the church has kept it ever since.

The front is plain brick, and the pointed portal with its twisted stone colonnettes is the oldest thing a visitor sees. Inside, the medieval church has been almost entirely remade: a broad three-aisled interior in pink and white, barrel-vaulted, refitted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Chapel of San Pellegrino belongs to that later work, all polychrome marble and gilt around the urn. The chapter room is the exception, and holds what the rest of the building lost.