The paintings in this church are older than the church. The canvases are of the Ligurian school of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and among them is a Holy Family attributed to Domenico Piola; the building that holds them, on the other hand, was rebuilt in the twentieth century. In a parish the things you can take off the wall nearly always outlive the wall.
What to see
According to some sources a church already existed here in the seventeenth century. The parish community was born in 1621, when cardinal Stefano Durazzo of Genoa detached it from the parish of Santo Stefano di Pannesi and made it a rectory; in 1836 it became a provostship and at the beginning of the twentieth century the seat of an archpriesthood.
Domenico Piola ran the most active painting workshop in Genoa in the second half of the seventeenth century, and works by him or his circle are found in dozens of Ligurian churches. Finding one in a parish church of the Fontanabuona is not exceptional: it is how the market for sacred art worked in this region.
Visiting
The church is in via Gattorne, in the centre of Lumarzo, in the val Fontanabuona; it is a parish church and opens for services. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Look at the Holy Family and then look at the walls around it. That painting was taken down, packed, put aside during the rebuilding works and then hung back up: it went through the building site that destroyed and remade its own church. Canvases travel, walls do not, and that is why in village churches the furnishings tell a longer story than the building.