In 1830 the mayor of Avigliano dismissed it as a crude and unseemly hovel: this was the old church of Filiano, dedicated to the Madonna of the Most Holy Rosary and facing the square that still carries her name. Its owner, don Andrea Pace, rebuilt it by a method that explains itself: he asked the faithful to bring a stone every time they came to Mass. Put up in stages, in late nineteenth-century forms, it was finished in 1885, and the Pace brothers, who claimed to own the building, went on fixing it up in the years that followed. For a long while it stayed a working chapel that, for want of money, could not be declared a parish.
What to see
The church you walk into is the sum of additions paid for one at a time. In 1905 Monsignor Ignazio Monterisi raised it to a perpetual vicariate over the scattered hamlets around, from Iscalunga to Inforchia and Cerasale, and that same year the Società Daziaria di Filiano paid for the baptismal font; then came the marble facing of the high altar and the sacristy. In 1922 Giuseppe Pace fenced the presbytery off from the nave with an iron railing; in 1978 the town council and the offerings of the faithful bought the statue of Saint Joseph.
The bell tower dates from 1930 and would not be there without two contributions put together: money collected from the townspeople and a substantial sum from prince Andrea Doria Pamphili, lord of Lagopesole. Two bells and the town's public clock went up with it.
Visiting
It is no longer the parish church: in 1960, once the new church had been consecrated, the older building passed from the title of the Madonna of the Rosary to the cult of Saint Joseph, and the main services moved away. Check times with the parish before walking up to the square. The new parish church, inaugurated on 11 September 1960 and also dedicated to the Madonna of the Rosary, stands in the same small town: both can be seen on one walk. Inside, the thing to look at first is the presbytery floor, relaid in 1949, when the vicariate finally became a parish.
Our editors' tip
Look for the inscription set into the presbytery floor: it records exactly that change of 1949. The people of Filiano had been asking for a priest of their own since the middle of the nineteenth century, because the clergy of Avigliano struggled to get up here; the first, don Alessandro Santoro, took office in 1934 and stayed until 1965.