Basilica Notre-Dame of Geneva

About this audio guide

This guide to the Basilica Notre-Dame in Geneva opens with an act of violence in fifteen thirty-five, when Reformation partisans took a hatchet to a small painted panel of the Virgin Mary, and follows the building through Geneva's Protestant era, an eighteen-fifties construction, and a government seizure that shut Catholics out for decades. You will also hear about a marble statue near the altar and the formal coronation performed over it in nineteen thirty-seven. Listen at the basilica's threshold, where an old pilgrim road toward Santiago de Compostela both ends and begins.