An oratory is not a church: it is the house of a confraternity, the place where the objects of the procession are kept and made ready. This one was founded in the second half of the fifteenth century along with the confraternity of the Disciplinanti, and inside it still keeps some processional crucifixes, which in Liguria are a serious business.
What to see
The front has a classical pronaos with four granite columns, and on either side, set into the front itself, two square-based bell towers: an unusual solution, which gives the building the symmetry of a temple. Inside there is a single altar, in eighteenth-century polychrome marble, with the statue of the titular saint and behind it a canvas of God the Father.
There is also a wooden altar crucifix, perhaps of the seventeenth century, and the processional crucifixes. The Ligurian ones are great carved crosses, often decorated in silver, weighing dozens of kilos, which at the feasts are carried by one man alone, balanced against his belly, for the whole route: carrying one is a role that is inherited and displayed.
Visiting
The oratory is in piazza dei Caduti per la Libertà, at Cogorno, on the heights above Chiavari; it opens for services and for the confraternity's activities, so it is worth asking. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
If you manage to see the crucifixes close up, look at the base: there is the socket where the bearer rests it, worn away with use. It is the point where an object of devotion becomes a tool, and it tells you more than any description how far that tradition was really practised, and not merely handed down.