If you find yourself walking around Rome with your nose pointed at the sky (not generally advisable in the historic center, what with the cobblestones and the scooters, but in this case it’s actually worth the risk), sooner or later you’ll spot a small niche or frame tucked into a wall, holding a sacred image — usually the Virgin Mary, sometimes a saint. This different kind of painting or statuette is typically surrounded by a few fake plants and an oil lamp (lit or not, nobody quite remembers who put it there). Occasionally, there are small votive plaques, and more rarely, actual ex-votos — decorations or carved text left behind to give thanks for a favor granted.

These are Rome’s edicole sacre, sacred street shrines, better known to Romans by their affectionate nickname: madonnelle, “little Madonnas.” Also known as “Marian shrines”,  they’re everywhere. In the historic center alone, there are reportedly over five hundred of them — meaning that on almost any walk through the old city, you’re never more than a couple of blocks from one, whether you notice it or not.

Rome is, after all, the cradle of Christianity, with the Vatican just across the river, so it’s tempting to assume every one of these little shrines commemorates some miraculous event — a vision, an apparition, a healing. Legend certainly likes to tell it that way. The truth, though, is usually more down-to-earth, and honestly more interesting for it.

Many madonnelle simply retrace the old pilgrim routes that once led the faithful toward St. Peter’s Basilica or other major churches — a kind of devotional trail of breadcrumbs through the city. Others work as an unofficial map of a Rome that no longer exists: they mark the spot where a church or chapel once stood before these were torn down, whether because they had fallen into disrepair, burned in a fire, collapsed in an earthquake, or flattened by war. And others are themselves ex-votos, offered directly out of gratitude. One example is the Madonna del Divino Amore on Via Sforza, in the Monti neighborhood — relatively recent by Roman standards, since it dates only to 1950, placed there by someone giving thanks for surviving the Second World War.

From a modern point of view, these shrines can look like a charmingly “folk” way of expressing devotion in a city that already has a church on every corner. Here’s the twist, though, and it tends to surprise people: Christians didn’t invent the custom of putting sacred images at street corners. They borrowed it from who came before them.

In ancient Rome, at crossroads and along the boundaries of private land, you’d find small shrines called larari, dedicated to the Lares — household and guardian spirits believed to watch over family, property, and travelers. When the Empire fell, those pagan shrines were, over time, repurposed to keep protecting the same intersections, the same streets, the same passersby as always. Only the gods on duty changed.

Even the little oil lamp burning in front of the image descends directly from the eternal flames once kept lit before statues of the old gods. It’s no coincidence that the custom really took off during the Renaissance and then the 17th and 18th centuries, when these shrines doubled as the city’s only street lighting: conveniently, a way to keep everyone from tripping into a ditch on their way home.

If you only have time to photograph one, make it the shrine on Via dei Coronari, a picturesque street of antique shops just north of Piazza Navona — and, conveniently, right around the corner from where we’re based, at . At the corner with Vicolo Domizio stands the so-called Immagine di Ponte (“Image of the Bridge”), possibly the oldest sacred shrine in the city. An image was first placed here in the 1400s, then rebuilt in 1523 by the architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, featuring a Coronation of the Virgin painted by Perin del Vaga, a pupil of Raphael.

The shrine’s patron has a story worthy of a film script. Alberto Serra di Monferrato narrowly escaped death by the Landsknecht soldiers during the Sack of Rome in 1527 — one of the most brutal events in the city’s history, when these troops looted and terrorized Rome for months — only to drop dead of a heart attack the instant he crossed the threshold into the safety of Castel Sant’Angelo. Saved and dead in the very same breath.

If this has piqued your curiosity, there’s an entire book dedicated to the subject: “Le edicole sacre di Roma” by Sergio Gittarelli (ACM editions). It’s in Italian, but even if you don’t read the language, it’s packed with photographs and addresses that make a great excuse for building your own shrine-hunting walk through the city, one corner at a time. For a more in-depth analysis of the phenomenon, we also recommend (in English).