This solitary spot, three kilometres from the village, changed hands six times in five hundred years, and every owner was a different power of northern Italy. First a Byzantine fortress, then — so the sources say — a monastery willed by a Lombard king, then the Benedictines of Bobbio, then Pavia, then the bishop of Genoa, and finally the Fieschi counts.
What to see
A document of 972 entrusts the complex to the monks of the abbey of San Colombano at Bobbio, who from here administered the whole Sturla valley. In the twelfth century it passed to the abbot of San Pietro in Ciel d'oro at Pavia and then to the bishop of Genoa; it was the Fieschi, having become masters of Borzone, who obtained that in 1184 the church be raised to an abbey by the Genoese archbishop.
The following year it became a parochial commenda and stayed so for more than six centuries; the territory of Borzonasca was subject to the abbey until the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth came new windows, decorations and marble altars. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the complex has been a national monument, and today the parish runs it on behalf of the diocese of Chiavari.
Visiting
The abbey is at Borzone, about three kilometres from the centre of Borzonasca, above the val Sturla; you get there by car or on foot, and it opens for services and on visiting days. An hour.
Our editors' tip
Walk the last kilometres. The isolation is not an accident of geography, it is the design: monasteries deliberately chose their distance from the settlement, and it is the one thing about an abbey you can still feel on your skin exactly as they did a thousand years ago. Everything else has changed; that has not.