On the left altar of this hill church is a wooden high relief of the Crucifixion which, after some study, has been attributed to a sixteenth-century Flemish school. It is not an isolated case: Genoa was a port, and from the port came northern art too, bought as everything else was bought.
What to see
The building is of the seventeenth century and stands in the hamlet of Testana, on the heights between Avegno and Recco. Besides the Flemish relief it holds a canvas of the Circumcision by Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari, one of the most active Genoese painters of the seventeenth century: two works arriving from different worlds and standing in the same room.
It is a hamlet parish church, with no great architectural ambitions, and its interest lies entirely in what it contains. It is churches like this, in Liguria, that explain better than any museum what it meant to have the largest port of the western Mediterranean half an hour away by mule track.
Visiting
The church is in piazza Santa Margherita, in the hamlet of Testana, municipality of Avegno, behind the golfo Paradiso; it is a parish church and opens for services. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Go up to the relief and look at how many figures fit into it. Sixteenth-century Flemish carving works like that: crowded scenes, small figures, minute details to be read close up. Italian altars of the same period go for a few large figures. That comparison alone tells you that this piece of wood crossed half of Europe before it got up here.