Noticeably sagging toward the east, this extraordinary church stands upon the site of an earlier chapel that housed a replica of Our Lady of Loreto brought from Italy by a Jesuit priest in 1675. The current church was completed in 1816 with the obligatory neoclassical facade of the period. It promptly started sinking into the ground but fortunately stopped a few years later. Inside, the sinking effect makes you feel like you’re in a topsy-turvy funhouse. A magnificent cupola, ringed at the base by stained-glass images, crowns an unusual four-lobed cross with semicircular chapels in the lobes. After the 1985 earthquake the building was raided of its treasures, and the murals that covered the underside of the cupola were allowed to deteriorate.
