Église Notre-Dame de la Visitation de Villers-la-Ville, Romanesque church in Villers-la-Ville, Belgium.
The Église Notre-Dame de la Visitation is built of schist rubble stone with slate roofs, its Romanesque square tower rising against the west front with walls one metre thick. A small turret with a conical roof, added in the 20th century, clings to the tower's south side. The neo-Romanesque south facade has a porch with a blue-stone arch, three arched windows above and a stone cross at the gable. The semicircular apse faces north toward rue Jules Tarlier.
The church rests on foundations laid in the 13th century, though its distinctive Romanesque tower was built earlier between the 11th and 12th centuries. This early tower remains one of the oldest architectural features, showing how the building evolved over several centuries.
The 1610 blue-stone tomb of François and Hélène de Marbais and their daughter Jeanne stands four metres high and two wide, moved into the rebuilt church in 1946; the dead man kneels between four coats of arms beneath the motto Hodie Mihi, Cras Tibi. Jeanne's death that year passed the seigneurie of Marbais to Jean t'Serclaes, comte de Tilly. Two wooden retables remain: the Nativity (third quarter of the 15th century) and Notre-Dame (mid-16th century).
The main entrance is the classical blue-stone portal dated 1825 in the west face of the tower, reached from the rue de Sart side; the chancel end faces the rue Jules Tarlier. The nave was rebuilt in 1925, so the interior is modern neo-Romanesque. A replica of the Lourdes grotto stands to the left of the church.
The chancel faces north toward rue Jules Tarlier while the main facade faces south toward rue de Sart, so the apse is not oriented east as is customary. The semicircular apse is split into two registers by a ledge just over a metre above the ground, with two round-arched windows framed in schist blocks and blue-stone sills.
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