In 1580 this church was turned round. The works, paid for by the Ghisolfi family, moved the main door to where the choir had been: those who used to enter at one end began to enter at the other, and the building found itself reversed with respect to how it was born. It is not a whim, it is what happens when the road moves or the village grows on the wrong side.
What to see
A marble tablet set into the outside wall records some restorations made in 1209, which means the church already existed before: that date is not a foundation, it is a maintenance job. More works followed at the end of the thirteenth century, then the great intervention of the late sixteenth that gave it its present orientation.
The bell tower beside it was restored at the end of the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth was given four bells. It is the parish church of Ceranesi, in a valley climbing from Genoa towards the hinterland: churches like this were for centuries the only public building of villages made of scattered houses.
Visiting
The church is in piazza della Chiesa, in the centre of Ceranesi, half an hour from Genoa up the valley; it is a parish church, so it opens for services. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Walk round the building looking for the scars of the reversal: a walled-up door, a window at a height that makes no sense, a patch of older masonry where the apse now is. When a church is turned round, the inside is remade and the outside forgets to lie.