In 1854, the year in which the Holy Father Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (8 December), in Montemelino the construction of a new parish church was being considered.
The subsequent apparitions of the Holy Virgin to the shepherdess Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes (1858) ignited the enthusiasm of the population who, finally laying the first stone of the new parish church in 1865, decided to dedicate it without any doubt to the Virgin of Lourdes. The Sanctuary of Montemelino thus becomes the first church built in Italy in honor of the Madonna of Lourdes, a few years after the Apparitions.
A few years later the parish priest Don Giuseppe Vincenti, suffering from severe epileptic attacks, went to Lourdes to ask for the protection of the Virgin for himself and for the completion of the church, still bare and unadorned.
Receiving the grace of healing, as a sign of thanks, he brought back a statue of the Virgin from France in the year 1883, in order to feed the devotion to the Immaculate Conception in the people.