This church changed its saint, and nobody knows when. It was first dedicated to saint Michael the archangel and was called the priory of San Michele del Bosco; then, at some point, it became San Bartolomeo. Neither the date of the first building nor that of the change of dedication is known: both have vanished.
What to see
It is no small detail. A church's dedication is the most stable thing it has: it survives collapses, rebuildings and changes of ownership, and when it changes it nearly always means something big happened. Here something did, and it was never written down anywhere.
As a monastic priory the church held several communities together: those of San Rufino and San Tommaso del Curlo, at Leivi, and that of San Pietro di Sampierdicanne, today in the municipality of Chiavari. In front is a forecourt of polychrome pebble paving of nineteenth-century making, laid with the technique known in Liguria as risseu.
Visiting
The church is in via Miramare, in the hamlet of San Bartolomeo, municipality of Leivi, on the hills above Chiavari; it is a parish church and opens for services. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Look at the paving and count the colours. Most Ligurian risseu are black and white, because those are the stones the sea brings ashore in quantity; this one is polychrome, and every extra colour means another kind of pebble, searched out, gathered and sorted by hand before being laid. The difference between two colours and four is months of work.