The finest thing in this baroque church was not born here. It is a fifteenth-century triptych by Giovanni Barbagelata, with the Crucifixion, the Virgin and Child and saint Monica, and it was brought to Casarza from the Romanesque church of Candiasco. In Liguria this happens often: when an old church empties out, its panels move into the new one.
What to see
The building was put up in the seventeenth century in baroque forms and finished in 1693; the consecration came much later, in the mid eighteenth century, at the hands of the bishop of Brugnato. The front and the bell tower you see today are instead the result of the last restoration, of 1886.
The church is on the main square of Casarza, in the val Petronio, behind Sestri Levante. For centuries the parish belonged to the diocese of Brugnato; only at the end of the nineteen-fifties did it pass, along with the whole vicariate, into the present boundaries of the diocese of Chiavari.
Visiting
The church is in piazza della Vittoria, in the centre of Casarza Ligure; it is a parish church and opens for services and at hours worth checking. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Look at how the triptych sits inside this church: it does not. A fifteenth-century gold ground clashes with a baroque interior, and that clash is precisely the document. When a work in a church is two centuries older than everything around it, it nearly always means it comes from another building, and that the other building is gone.