Santuario di Santa Teresa di Gesù Bambino, Minor basilica in Borgo Roma District, Verona, Italy.
The Santuario di Santa Teresa di Gesù Bambino is a Gothic Revival church in Borgo Roma, Verona, with a brick-clad façade crowned by five pinnacles and a large pointed-arch portal with a trifora above. Its single nave has eight side chapels and a raised presbytery with a semicircular apse; the bell tower, completed in 1955, stands on the south side.
The first stone was laid on 29 July 1901, and the building was inaugurated and blessed on 15 January 1905 by Bishop Bartolomeo Bacilieri under the title of the Holy Family. It stood unfinished, with bare walls and a rough ceiling, until 1922–23, when devotion to Thérèse of Lisieux spread. Pope Pius XI raised it to minor basilica in 1938; in 1967 Bishop Giuseppe Carraro made it a Teresian basilica-sanctuary.
The chapel's centrepiece is a solid bronze urn held up by four angels, containing a wax figure of Saint Thérèse shown at the moment of death, dressed in a Carmelite habit with the veil she wore at Lisieux. In her hands she holds roses, recalling her promise: "I will let fall a shower of roses." A silver filigree reliquary holds one of her vertebrae.
The sanctuary stands in Borgo Roma, on Verona's southern outskirts, with the entrance facing a large square enclosed by a wrought-iron gate on white marble columns. The marble monument to Saint Therese, set among rose beds, marks the approach. The bell tower rises along the southern side, next to the convent and its cloister.
The building houses a remarkable Fratelli Ruffatti pipe organ installed in 1959, featuring about 4,700 pipes that sound during religious services. This instrument is a rare example of post-war large-scale organ craftsmanship in northern Italy.
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