Cuglieri, Church of Our Lady of the Snow

The Basilica stands on the highest part of the town, on the Bardosu Hill, in an extraordinarily panoramic position.
Local tradition tells that, at an unspecified time in the 13th century, the construction of the church was determined by prodigious circumstances, which began with the discovery of a statue of the Madonna and Child on the nearby beach of Pittinuri. However, no evidence of a first medieval foundation remains in the current structures of the building, which has had the title of Roman Minor Basilica since 1919. Yet there is documentary evidence of the existence of the church as early as the 15th century, we are aware of extensive restoration work at the end of the 17th century and of a new intervention in the second half of the eighteenth century, to which the interiors were transformed into the more sober Piedmontese baroque.
The temple is structured as a single-aisled hall, with a lunetted barrel vault, divided into four bays by subtarches with coffered rings and rosette decorations on a gold background.
Eight chapels (four on each side) open to the aisle, also turned in barrels and illuminated by skylights and domed, with balustraded entrances. The cornices connecting the chapels to the aisle are punctuated by shell pilasters with semi-capitals composed of stucco composite, raised on a large plinth at the subarches of the vault.
The presbytery, introduced by an arch that reduces its width compared to the nave, is raised, and is completed by an apse with a nail plate, illuminated by quadrangular windows. Inside there is a spectacular 'fan' altar in marble and masonry, surmounted by a tall dome on plumes and an octagonal drum.
On the occasion of the solemn coronation of the simulacrum of the Virgin and Child, in 1893, they wanted to give even greater solemnity to the interiors of the temple, entrusting their pictorial decoration with tempera to Emilio Scherer from Parma (but resident in Bosa), paintings that were finally removed in the mid-twentieth century due to the excessive deterioration and reconstruction of large sections of the walls that threatened the collapse.
Between 1912 and 1913, the nave was extended with the choir room, built on three arches, and the façade was rebuilt according to a design by the Cuglieritan Cav. Roberto Sanna. The large façade, in neo-gothic forms, rises on two orders, to which is added the tympanum 'the lantern of a carabiniere' which, set back, leaves room for a large terrace. The lower order is adorned with pilasters with composite capitals and the shaped pointed frame of the door, the upper one has three ogival windows. The new façade machine has also recovered the two “small” bell towers, present old on the sides of the building, but regularizing them in the medieval style, complete with crowning with spires and acroters, a suggestion re-proposed to Cuglieri, a decade later, in the bell tower of the Regional Seminary of the Sacred Heart.

History of studies
The church is the subject of a brief summary in F. Masala's volume on nineteenth-century architecture (2001).

Bibliography by
G. Angotzi, Report of the solemn festivities for the Coronation of the Holy Virgin of the Snow, Owner and Patron of the Distinguished Collegiate Church of Cuglieri, Cagliari, Typo-Commercial Lithograph, 1894; M. Dadea, “The Sanctuary of Santa Maria della Neve. Cuglieri”, in Jubilary Itineraries in the Province of Oristano, Sestu, Zonza, 2000;
M.A. Scanu, “Sardinian Regional Seminar of the Sacred Heart”, in F. Masala, Architecture from the Unification of Italy to the end of the 20th century, series “History of Art in Sardinia”, Nuoro, Ilisso, 2001, sch. 77; M.A. Scanu, Emilio Scherer, Nuoro, Poliedro, 2002.