Why pilgrims come
A sacred place worth the journey.
A 2025 bronze monument by Yang Dongbai showing Venerable Matteo Ricci in conversation with Paul Xu Guangqi, the Chinese scholar-official, scientist, Catholic convert, and collaborator who helped carry Ricci’s work into late-Ming intellectual life. Beside them stands a copy of Ricci’s Beijing tomb stele. This is a civic monument rather than a church, shrine, relic, or liturgical destination, included because it gives visible form to a consequential Catholic encounter between Europe and China.
The pilgrim’s guide
What makes this visit meaningful
Pause in Ricci’s birthplace before a contemporary monument to a friendship that linked Jesuit learning, the Chinese classics, science, and Christian faith. The work is most meaningful as an interpretive stop alongside Macerata’s churches and Ricci heritage, not as a substitute for a shrine visit.
A conversation across civilizations
Ricci and Xu are shown as collaborators in dialogue rather than as a solitary European missionary and passive recipient.
Ricci’s tomb stele
A copy of the Beijing funerary stele connects Macerata to the Jesuit’s burial place in China.
A civic Catholic-history stop
The monument belongs to a public square, giving visitors an interpretive waypoint rather than a church or shrine.
Continue nearby