In 1439 a document records the consecration of the church of Santa Caterina: it is the first time the building appears in writing, and the fifteenth-century foundation rests on that date. Back then the façade faced north; the present orientation is the result of the rebuilding begun in 1607 and finished in 1609, which turned the church round. Of the older fabric only a few fragments of the doorway survive, kept at Masone and now temporarily housed in the oratory of San Sebastiano.
What to see
The interior has three aisles — a wide central one and two side aisles — marked out by piers with pilasters that run into the chancel, where the main chapel is flanked by two smaller ones. The high altar is of polychrome marble, the work of Lombard marble-cutters; in the transept the left altar holds the Madonna del Rosario, a marble statue by Filippo Parodi, while the right one, formerly dedicated to Saint Lucy, keeps in its niche the processional case of the Madonna degli Angeli.
The wooden group inside that case is the finest thing here: eighteenth-century, attributed with good reason to Anton Maria Maragliano and his workshop, it was bought in 1811 from the convent of the Santissima Annunziata del Vastato in Genoa. Look also for the white marble font, probably Genoese work from the turn of the seventeenth century; the polychrome wooden Ecce Homo by an unknown Neapolitan sculptor, in the chapel of the Misericordia; and the canvases, from Bernardo Castello's Assumption of the Virgin, dated 1621 and set above the sacristy door, to the Visitation by Simone Balli.
Visiting
The church is the parish church of Rossiglione Superiore and stands in piazza Madonna degli Angeli, in the upper part of the village, in the Stura valley. Ecclesiastical boundaries here do not follow administrative ones: the municipality belongs to the metropolitan city of Genoa, the parish to the diocese of Acqui, after being attached to Tortona from 1478, moved to Casale Monferrato in the Napoleonic years and returned to Acqui in 1816. Opening times follow the mass timetable. The neoclassical façade, redesigned in 1856, is the last layer of five centuries of building work; and the river below is not incidental, because a flood of the Stura in the eighteenth century damaged the furnishings and carried off the old organ, replaced only in 1862.
Our editors' tip
Come during the patronal feast, when the case of the Madonna degli Angeli leaves its niche: carried on shoulders, the group reads as it was meant to, with the light travelling over the figures instead of flattening them. Outside the feast, ask in the sacristy for the transept lights to be switched on: in the gloom Parodi's statue and the marble of the side altars — those of Saint Roch and the Madonna del Carmine are by Bernardo Mantero — cannot be seen for what they are.