Pious legends claim the same house was flown over by angelic beings from Nazareth to Tersatto (Trsat in Croatia), then to Recanati, before arriving at the current site.

The façade of the church was erected under Sixtus V, who in 1586 fortified Loreto and gave it the privileges of a town; his colossal statue stands on the parvis, above the front steps, a third of the way to the left as one enters.

In the sacristies on each side of the right transept are frescoes, on the right by Melozzo da Forlì, on the left by Luca Signorelli and in both there are some fine intarsias; the basilica as a whole is thus a collaborative work by generations of architects and artists.

[8] The statue was commissioned after a fire in the Santa Casa in 1921 destroyed the original Madonna, and it was granted a Canonical Coronation in 1922 by Pope Pius XI.

[8][10] The original statue, dating back to the 1400s, was an image of the Black Madonna with the Christ Child, both of whom were covered since the 16th century with a jeweled mantle or dalmatic.

It was returned with the Treaty of Tolentino and ended up in Rome, from where the image made an eight-day journey as a pilgrim Madonna, arriving in Loreto on 9 December 1801.

At the behest of Pope Pius XI, a new image similar to the original was immediately carved, using the wood of a cedar of Lebanon from the Vatican Gardens.

[11] There is a local tradition in the city of Treia that the original statue of Our Lady of Loreto was hidden and replaced with a copy before Napoleon's troops looted the basilica.

[12] Around the house is a tall marble screen designed by Bramante[1] and executed under Popes Leo X, Clement VII and Paul III.

[15] Late medieval religious traditions developed suggesting that this was the house in which the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph and Jesus) had lived while in Judea at the start of the first century AD.

[5] According to this narrative, this is the Nazareth house in which Mary had been born and brought up, received the Annunciation, conceived Jesus through the Holy Spirit, and had lived during the childhood of Christ.

[6] After Jesus's Ascension, the house was converted into a church where the Apostles placed an altar, at which Saint Peter celebrated the first Eucharist after the Resurrection.

[17] An authority on Loreto has summed up the controversy concerning the miraculous flight of the Holy House by writing that it has attracted "the ridicule of one half of the world and the devotion of the other.

The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia reports that the stones and mortar of the house are claimed to be typical of 1st century Nazareth and Palestine, but not of Loreto and the Marches.

[19] Another Catholic book, from 1895, claims further that investigations in 1751 found the house to be placed directly on uncleared ground, on top of miscellaneous paving stones, shells, nuts, and bushes.

[21][22] A sixteenth-century investigation ordered by Pope Clement VII reported that the house's measurements exactly matched those of foundations in front of the Grotto in Nazareth.

An early brief reference is made in the Italia Illustrata of Flavius Blondus (1392–1463), secretary to Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V, Calixtus III and Pius II; it can be read in its entirety in the Redemptoris mundi Matris Ecclesiæ Lauretana historia, contained in the Opera Omnia (1576) of Baptista Mantuanus.

[27] In May 1900, papal physician Giuseppe Lapponi indicated that he had read in the Vatican archives documents suggesting that the members of the noble Byzantine family named Angelos had saved the stones of the House from Muslim devastation and transported them to Loreto.

[28] In a second step, in late 1294, Nikephoros, ruler of Epirus from the Angelos family (in Italian: Niceforo Angeli), sent on the bricks to Italy as a wedding gift for his daughter who had married Prince Philip, the son of the King of Naples, in October that year.

[29] The stones considered by researchers to be authentic are still visibly marked with Roman numerals, by scratching or with coal, which suggests that the three walls were carefully taken apart with the intention to faithfully reassemble them at another location.

[30] Helena was Regent of the Duchy of Athens from the death of her husband in 1287 until her son's reaching the age of majority in 1294, covering the entire time span of the translation of the Holy House from Nazareth, to Epirus, to Recanati (Loreto).

[4] The treasury was emptied, either looted by soldiers, or its contents requisitioned by the pope who needed money for the payments required by the Treaty of Tolentino, which he had signed with Napoleon.

[42] In October 2019 Pope Francis restored to the universal Roman calendar, the feast of Our Lady of Loreto, as an optional memorial commemorated on 10 December.