The chapel called Ta' Pinu, after Pinu Gauci who cared for it in earlier centuries, stands alone in the fields of Gozo. In 1883 Karmni Grima, passing by, said she heard a voice calling her to go in and pray; the reports of favours that followed drew growing numbers of pilgrims, and a large church was built beside the old chapel, which was incorporated into it. The shrine was raised to the rank of a minor basilica and became the national Marian sanctuary of Malta. St. John Paul II prayed there in 1990 and Pope Francis in 2022.

The account at the heart of Ta' Pinu is not a vision but a call to prayer, which is a useful correction to devotion that hunts for the extraordinary: what is asked of the passer-by is simply to go in and pray. The ex-votos express the Church's belief in intercessory prayer and in the communion of saints, and the shrine has become the place where an entire island nation entrusts its sick to the Mother of God.

Malta (Gozo)

The painting over the altar of the old chapel shows the Assumption of Our Lady. The walls of the corridors behind the sanctuary are covered with ex-voto offerings — crutches, letters, plaster casts, photographs of the sick — left by pilgrims in thanksgiving.

• Ta' Pinu
• Our Lady of Ta Pinu

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