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The Basilica of the Holy House is one of the main places of Marian worship and one of the most important and visited Marian shrines in the Catholic world. Inside the basilica, Catholics worship devotion to the remains of the Holy House of Nazareth, where Jesus lived.

The history of the Sanctuary begins on December 10, 1294, with the arrival of the house perhaps inhabited by the family of the Virgin Mary in Nazareth and where Our Lady would have received the announcement of the birth of Jesus. First the precious relic was raised and covered by a vault , then it was surrounded by arcades, then by a small church and finally by the current Basilica. In 1468, under the bishop of Recanati, work began with the construction of the great temple and in 1587, with the addition of the façade, the building could finally be considered completed. Francesco Selva was the author of the frescoes and Pomarancio decorated it, while Tiburzio Vergelli created the majestic baptistery. With the Napoleonic invasion of the papal territories of 1797, Loreto was the subject of raids.

At the beginning of May 1291, with Nazareth and Palestine under the dominion of the Seljuk Turks, according to tradition, some angels took the Holy House and took it away in flight, leaving it on May 10, 1291, at Trsat (Trsat, now a district of the city of Rijeka, Croatia). In that place, however, the pilgrims were often prey to thieves and evildoers; so, three years and seven months later, the angels lifted it up again flying towards the Marches, depositing it near Ancona, in the place where today stands the church of Santa Maria Liberatrice di Posatora, whose name derives from tradition just from this event: pose-et-ora (stop and pray). It stayed there for nine months, after which the angels raised it up again to put it near Porto Recanati, in the locality of "Banderuola", where a small church still stands today. However, it was too close to the sea, exposed to the dangers of Turkish raids; furthermore, even there, criminals began to rush to rob the faithful who had come on pilgrimage. Therefore, eight months later, the house was again moved by angels on the land owned by two brothers, but again, after only four months, the same angels lifted the house and placed it, in December 1296, at the center of the road that goes from Recanati to its port, therefore in a public place, which no one could claim and exploit, on top of a hill (Mount Prodo), where it is currently located. The statue of the Virgin with Child, in cedar wood from Lebanon, replaces that of the 14th century, destroyed by a fire in 1921. The Madonna, also called Virgin Lauretana since the sixteenth century, covered with a characteristic jeweled mantle called dalmatic, is the statue revered in the Holy House. It is a black Madonna: its peculiarity is her dark face, common to the oldest icons, often due to the smoke of oil lamps and candles or to chemical changes suffered by the original colors. In some cases they are represented purposely black, inspired by the Song of Songs where they say: "Bruna are, but beautiful" and later, turning to friends: "Do not watch that I am brunette because I have sunburned the sun" (1 , 5-6), and in this case the Sun is considered to symbolize the figure of God.

There are numerous churches dedicated to the Madonna of Loreto and to the Holy House in the world. In Chile there is the Iglesia de Santa María de Loreto (church of Santa Maria di Loreto) in Achao, on the island of Quinchao. The chapel of 1740 is one of the oldest examples of the Churches of Chiloé, classified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000. In France we find the Church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris, located in the 9th arrondissement, near the Le Peletier underground stations. Built by architect Louis-Hippolyte Lebas between 1823 and 1836, the church was declared a historical monument of France on 28 December 1984. The cap above the semicircular apse presents the fresco by Pierre Claude François Delorme “Assumption of the Virgin and transport of the Holy House to Loreto” (1828). In Bohemia (Czech Republic) the Loreto Convent of Prague is the most important shrine in the city, in the center of the complex there is a copy of the famous Santa Casa, which was founded in 1634 by St. Catherine Benigna of Lobkowicz, Czech noblewoman whose family was very devoted to the cult of the Holy House of Loreto, so as to make it known to all the territory of Bohemia and to build their crypt under this reproduction of the Holy House. In Slovenia there is a chapel dedicated to the Madonna of Loreto inside the city's castle in the historic center of Maribor. The castle complex and also part of the chapel now house the Maribor Regional Museum, a demo-anthropological museum. In Spain, the Church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the masterpiece of the architect Antoni Gaudí, was initially commissioned to architect Francisco de Paula from Villar and Lozano, with the intention of building a copy of the Basilica of Loreto, inspired by the famous relic of the Holy House of Nazareth, where according to tradition lived Joseph, Mary and Jesus, or rather the Holy Family. In Slovenia there is a chapel dedicated to the Madonna of Loreto inside the city's castle in the historic center of Maribor. The castle complex and also part of the chapel now house the Maribor Regional Museum, a demo-anthropological museum.

As to use :
It could be interesting a research in the class on the religious legend of the Holy House and the link with the choice of Our Lady of Loreto, patron of aviators.
Very interesting is to find on the web and paper sources how poets and painters have recalled the transport of Santa Casa in flight imagining the flight of the Nazarene house almost like a modern flight: among the first examples we can mention the painting “Transport of the Holy House” of Loreto Giovan Battista Rositi from Forlì of 1501 and now preserved in the Diocesan Museum of Velletri. The most famous is the fresco, and relative sketch, that Giambattista Tiepolo created in 1743 for the vault of the Church of the Scalzi of Venice and today preserved in the Gallerie dell'Accademia.