Sacrario di Cristo Re overlooks Messina from a hill that once was the site of a Roman acropolis and later a Norman castle dedicated to Richard the Lionheart. The neo-baroque structure was built in 1937 as a memorial to WWI casualties. It contains the bodies of about 1,000 soldiers. Next to the church is this 130 ton bronze bell. It was cast from melted down enemy cannons and it sits on a tower from the ruins of the Roccaguelfonia fortress.
The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.