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Heraclea was an ancient city of Magna Graecia. The ruins of the city are located in the modern comune of Policoro in Basilicata. It was a Greek colony, but founded at a period considerably later than most of the other Greek cities in this part of Italy. The foundation of the city is placed by Diodorus in 432 BCE. It became famous as the site of the first major battle of the Pyrrhic War in 280 BCE in which king Pyrrhus of Epirus defeated a Roman army on the head of a coalition of Southern Italian Greek city states.
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.