About this oratory we know that we do not know. In the eighteenth century someone set down, in proper inventories, everything the building owned: pictures, furnishings, fittings, piece by piece. Those lists have been lost, and with them any chance of saying what was inside. The objects remain, but without the sheet of paper that named them.
What to see
What has come down to us is a wooden statue of the martyrdom of saint Sebastian, of the eighteenth century, by an unknown sculptor; the remains of a marble reliquary of the century before; two processional crucifixes; some paintings and processional crosses of the nineteenth century. The exterior you see today is the rebuilding of 1910, and in the old reports there is no description at all of the earlier front.
On the foundation the sources propose the fifteenth century, but without proof. The first official mention is of 1585, when the bishop of Viterbo Carlo Montigli came through on an apostolic visit: after the council of Trent the inspectors toured Italy counting altars, and it is to them that we owe the first written line about a great many village churches.
Visiting
The oratory is in the settlement of Rossiglione Inferiore, in the Stura valley, in the Genoese hinterland towards Piedmont; it opens for services and for the confraternity's events. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the statue of saint Sebastian and keep in mind that its author is unknown because of a mislaid sheet of paper. The work was not lost, the document was: and without the document a sculptor whom somebody paid and knew becomes anonymous for ever. Archives do not preserve papers, they preserve names.
