In February 1800 French soldiers under General André Masséna occupied the church of San Michele Arcangelo and set it on fire; in the years that followed, what was left of the building served as a hayloft and a cattle shed. Yet this was one of the oldest churches in the area: some sources place its foundation in the fifth century, and the first certain mention is a will dated 3 April 1192 that leaves it five soldi. A deed issued by Pope Gregory IX on 13 May 1239 records that it had a chapter of canons of its own.
What to see
The church did not start out as we see it now: it had a single nave, the apse was added in the thirteenth century and the second nave in the fifteenth. The bell tower is fourteenth-century, but the spire that closes it was rebuilt in 1950, along with the repairs made necessary by damage from the Second World War. Look at the masonry from outside and the building phases are still legible in the joints and in the changes of stone.
Its present appearance is owed to a campaign of the early twentieth century. The building was almost a ruin when archpriest Francesco Gazzolo commissioned its recovery from the architects Marco Aurelio Crotta and Alfredo d'Andrade; the work was finished in 1906. The administrative history is just as turbulent: from 1414 the community was joined to the church of San Lorenzo della Costa, from 1434 it was attached to the pieve of Santa Maria di Camogli, with a single independent spell between 1468 and 1471, and only on 19 December 1578 did the two communities obtain separate parish status.
Visiting
San Michele stands at Ruta, the upper hamlet of Camogli, in via Romana di Bana, on the pass the road crosses on its way down towards the Tigullio; you get there by car along the climb that starts in the lower town. This is a working parish church, part of the Recco-Uscio-Camogli vicariate of the archdiocese of Genoa, so it keeps no museum hours: the interior is generally open around services, in the morning and in the late afternoon. Outside those windows, reckon on seeing it from the outside only.
Our editors' tip
We stand under the bell tower and look up: the 1950 spire can be told apart from the fourteenth-century shaft by the colour and the cut of the stone, and it is the quickest way to grasp how many centuries of patching this church carries. We also suggest stopping at Ruta before going down to Camogli rather than after: from the lower town the climb is a different proposition, and summer weekend traffic eats up time you would rather spend elsewhere.