The piety of the late fifteenth century was at once deeply spiritual and intensely material. Place and space located the holy. The ephemeral physicality of textiles, wax, incense, water and hosts – consumed as they were touched, lit, sprinkled or swallowed – made transcendence sensory and sensible. Believers prayed, donated, sheltered and healed in shrines and hospitals and engaged with saints in icons and altarpieces. Saints might sublimate, but if the Word really was to be made flesh and live among us, it would be in forms and substances of the material world. The material piety of the fifteenth century was once taken as crass, manipulative or superstitious, and now it seems more atuned to the interweaving of the physical and the spiritual in the makeup of the world. Franciscan Observants were keenly aware of how much the spirit needed touch, and they built movements around icons, symbols and the power of place. Entrusted in 1434 with the custody of the holy sites in Jerusalem, they cleared the precincts of unholy presences – Jews above all – and hammered forward on place and proximity. In the late fifteenth century a few Observants moved to recreate the holiest places in so-called Sacred Mountains in Piedmont and Tuscany. Recreating Jerusalem's streets on Italian slopes, they created complexes with dozens of shrines where frescoes and life-size terracotta figures enacted gospel narratives ranging from the massacre of the innocents to the crucifixion and ascension. Baroque tactile values, technologies and sensory registers expanded the scale and number of sacred mountains across Piedmont in particular, with almost a dozen emerging over time along themes that moved beyond gospel narrative to include celebrations of the Virgin, re-enactments of the rosary and commemorations of St Francis or St Carlo Borromeo. Geoffrey Symcox here expands on the evolving political, social, devotional and artistic contexts of the oldest such mount at Varallo (from 1486), where forty-three shrines still remain, before drawing in others for comparison. Borromeo's final devotional pilgrimage to Varallo shortly before he died underscored his deep attachment to its dramatic and compelling re-creations of sacred history. Symcox offers a sensitive reading of these spiritual dimensions and highlights the steadily growing appreciation over the past century of the creative artistry demonstrated in these shrines, which art historians once dismissed as popular folk art and cultural critics lampooned as Disney-esque theme parks. Yet, as Symcox also shows, they figured in the local politics of fractured communities at loggerheads with religious orders and external authorities, and in the dynastic strategies of generations of ambitious dukes of Savoy. This layered history brings out their palimpsest quality as material inventions that speak to renaissance and early modern spiritual, physical and political values and that carry forward to today. With a piety wholly modern and a politics more cannily global, nine of the Sacred Mountains were designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2003.