Basilica of the Annunciation

The Grotto of the Annunciation is small and irregular: the Custody measures it at 5.5 metres north to south and 6.14 metres west to east, with a little apse cut into the eastern wall. It is reached from the lower basilica by going down the seven steps of the eastern stairway, through the Chapel of the Angel, and out by the second stair. Both staircases sit where the Crusader entrances were, on the same principle as the two stairs into the grotto at Bethlehem.

The cave was never a shrine to begin with. It was a storage and working room under a house, of the kind cut into soft limestone all over this hillside, and the giveaways are still at the door: a pair of grain silos with circular mouths, first century and just after, set left and right of the entrance beyond the iron balustrade. Above and beside the grotto stand the Crusader piers that carried the arches of the twelfth-century church.

Three columns hold up the Crusader pier over the cave. Two stand outside the modern wall on the left, the larger known to pilgrims as the Angel column; the third is inside, broken and hanging from the roof, and is called the Virgin's column because it was believed to mark exactly where Mary sat. The column pushing up through the roof was split open in the Ottoman period by people who thought there was treasure inside it.

The altar carries the inscription Verbum caro hic factum est, here the Word was made flesh, and it survives from the small Franciscan church of 1730 rather than being modern. Behind it, up a stair built into the wall, is the cave the friars call Mary's kitchen. Humidity has been eating the grotto's surfaces, and ventilation holes were cut in recent years to slow it.

In March 1955 the 1730 church, its 1877 extension, the old convent and the schools all came down. Between April and June that year Bagatti and his collaborator Gaetano Pierri, with more than 120 local labourers digging daily, cleared roughly 90 by 60 metres north of the grotto. Wikipedia dates the demolition to 1954 and the Custody to March 1955, a difference of a season that has never been reconciled.

The Byzantine complex came up first: a church oriented east to west with three naves, a semicircular apse, an atrium in front and a monastery along its southern side, the whole running about 48 metres west to east and 27 metres north to south. Its mosaics are the best-known thing about it, and one carries a Greek inscription naming Conon, deacon of Jerusalem, as the donor. The Custody links that name to Conon of Nazareth, a second-century martyr who told a court he was descended from the family of Jesus. Crosses in the floor date the mosaics before 427, the year Theodosius II forbade the practice.

Below the Byzantine floor, when the mosaics were lifted in 1959 for safekeeping, came something older: blocks of painted and inscribed plaster, about seventy architectural pieces from a demolished religious building, and a rock-cut basin about two metres square and 1.6 metres deep with steps down one side. Bagatti first read the basin as a wine vat and then decided it was a Jewish-Christian baptismal pool. Joan Taylor's study of the Holy Land sites argues the opposite: that this basin and the near-identical one at St Joseph's were agricultural, for pressed grapes, and that the whole Jewish-Christian framework Bagatti and Emmanuele Testa built here rests on a definition of Jewish-Christian theology that was itself derived from their own excavation reports. The Custody's page prints Taylor's objection beside Bagatti's reading, which is unusually candid for a sanctuary describing its foundations.

The Crusader layer is the most spectacular and the least complete. The cathedral was begun soon after Tancred took Nazareth in 1102, was still being enlarged under Archbishop Letard in the 1170s, and was never finished: five Romanesque capitals carved for it were found in 1909 hidden in a cave under the convent parlour floor, apparently never installed and buried to keep them from being smashed. They are in the site museum now.

• Iron Age to Roman village: caves, silos, cisterns, an oil press, tombs from the Middle Bronze Age
• Pre-Byzantine structure: plastered blocks, graffiti, the disputed rock-cut basin
• Byzantine church and monastery: three naves, mosaics with crosses, the Conon inscription
• Crusader cathedral: begun after 1102, enlarged in the 1170s, sacked in 1187 and destroyed under Baibars
• Franciscan church of 1730, lengthened in 1877, demolished to clear the site

The Custody first gave the commission to Antonio Barluzzi, who had already built the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, the Beatitudes, the Visitation at Ain Karem and Dominus Flevit, and whose Nazareth drawings appeared in the Custody's own magazine in 1954. His scheme was a single great church on a central plan under one cupola, flanked by four bell towers, with the grotto at the middle in the manner of the Holy Sepulchre.

It was dropped. The Custody's own account puts the reason on the archaeology: once the village and the successive churches came out of the ground the Holy See asked that the remains stay visible, and a domed church centred on the grotto could not do that. The commission passed to the Milanese architect Giovanni Muzio on the proposal of Custos Alfredo Polidori, in a year the Custody's page does not state. La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana has Barluzzi still drawing designs for Nazareth in 1958, after a heart attack, and dying in 1960, nine years before Muzio's building was consecrated.

Muzio, born in 1893 and one of the Novecento Italiano circle in Milan, waived his fee. What he designed instead of a domed hall was a stacked pair of churches founded on the Crusader walls: a low, dark lower basilica in front of the grotto for prayer, and a large bright upper church for the parish and for pilgrimage, with a wide oculus over the grotto so that the two spaces read as one. The three apses below are rebuilt on the twelfth-century plan. The style is usually described as Italian Brutalism, and the fabric is reinforced concrete, laid in three separate sections so the building can move in an earthquake.

The lantern carries the argument. The cupola is built of prefabricated panels in a continuous zigzag that can be read as the letter M repeated without end, arranged in rays like the petals of a lily and meant to be seen as a lily inverted over the shrine below, opening downwards, with sixteen triangular windows around it. The concave white and pink stone facade is by the sculptor Angelo Biancini, with a three-metre bronze Christ Blessing on the tympanum, and the doors are by Roland Friedrichsen, the central Holy Door a gift from Bavaria. The contractor was the Israeli firm Solel Boneh, and the Custody credits the brick layers and stone cutters of Nazareth in its own account of the work.

The most distinctive thing inside is not the architecture but the decoration scheme, which Muzio built into the plan: the upper church and the portico around the courtyard carry images of the Virgin donated by Catholic communities around the world, each rendered in the visual language of the country that sent it. The Custody names fourteen on the upper church walls: Cameroon, Hungary, Brazil, the United States, Poland, Spain and Italy on one side, England, Australia, Argentina, Venezuela, Lebanon, Japan and Canada on the other. Dozens more line the portico.

The effect is a room where the same woman is Japanese, Cameroonian and Venezuelan in turn within twenty paces. They are gifts of different dates and very different quality, not a commissioned cycle by one hand.

The rest of the upper church is Italian and French mid-century religious art of a kind that has aged unevenly. The apse mosaic is by Salvatore Fiume, with the popes from Benedict XV to Paul VI worked into its lower right corner. The tall pointed windows on the south and west are by the Parisian glassmaker Max Ingrand; the sixteen dome windows in concrete and coloured glass are by the Swiss painter Yoki Aebischer; Adriano Alessandrini's marble floor sets out the Marian dogmas in order from the Council of Ephesus in 431. Down in the lower church the windows are by Lydia Roppolt and were a gift from Austria, the organ is by Tamburini of Cremona, and the cross in the central apse is by the Haifa sculptor Ben Shalom, copied from the crucifix that spoke to Francis at San Damiano.

The open paved square in front of the basilica has a history most visitors know nothing about. In 1997 permission was given to lay out a plaza there, on the site of a demolished Ottoman school called al-Harbyeh, to hold the crowds expected for the millennium and the papal visit. A group of Muslim activists occupied part of the plot, arguing that it was waqf land holding the shrine of Shihab al-Din, described in the accounts as a nephew of Saladin. There were street clashes at Easter 1999, and a cornerstone for a mosque was laid.

Israeli governments under Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak approved a mosque there. On 6 March 2002 the Sharon cabinet cancelled that approval and reinstated the plaza plan, after sustained pressure from the Vatican and the Holy Land churches, and the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops welcomed the decision the same day. In March 2003 the Nazareth District Planning Committee asked the district court to let it demolish the mosque foundations without waiting for the waqf's appeal, and the structure was cleared.

The basilica is a working parish church, not only a pilgrimage site. The Custody counts about 5,000 Latin faithful around it, in a city of 75,704 people, roughly 69 per cent Muslim and 31 per cent Christian, which the Central Bureau of Statistics recorded in 2024 as holding the largest Christian population of any city in Israel, 18,900. The Terra Sancta College attached to the convent teaches around 800 Christian and Muslim pupils.

The weekly rhythm is worth timing a visit around. An international Mass is said in the grotto at 11:00 every Saturday, followed by the Angelus, and a candlelit procession leaves the square in front of the convent on Saturday evenings. Once the upper church closes the lower basilica is given over to silent prayer, 18:00 to 21:00 daily. The Crown of Nazareth, a devotion peculiar to this sanctuary built on five episodes from the life of Jesus in this town, is prayed on Tuesdays. The feast of the Annunciation on 25 March is the year's high point, with the Latin Patriarch presiding and the Golden Rose given by John Paul II in 2000 carried around the grotto.