In the village they call it the Chiesuola, the little church, because it really is small. It stands on the last stretch of the road from Borzonasca to Villetto, and on the front, above the door, it has a marble tablet with a date nobody can quite read: some see 1459 there and some 1469. A decade of difference, and the matter has never been settled.
What to see
It was once dedicated to Our Lady of the Patarella. It has a single nave ending in a semicircular apse, and the gabled front is of local stone left exposed, with only two openings: a half-moon one high up, in line with the door, and a quadrangular one to the right of the doorway.
A statue of Our Lady of Consolation loaded with votive offerings was kept here. At the end of the eighteenth century the Napoleonic decrees stripped it of its crown and of all the precious gifts that adorned it. Shortly afterwards the daughter of the local notary, Barbara Marrè, had the ornament remade in silver and gave it: the state had taken the gold, a woman of the village put it back.
Visiting
The church is in via Augusto Raggio, at Borzonasca, in the val Sturla; it is small and subsidiary, so it opens rarely and mostly for the feast. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the small square window to the right of the door: it is crowned by a slate tympanum holding a relief of God the Father among angels, dated to the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Slate is the stone of this part of Liguria, and carving it is the trade of these valleys: on a large church you would not notice it, on one this size it is the main event.