Anyone doing the rounds of Ligurian churches meets Anton Maria Maragliano every ten stops, and sooner or later wonders who he was. He was the reference wood sculptor of the Republic of Genoa between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and his workshop supplied statues to a whole region. Here there is an Immaculate Conception of his, on one of the five marble altars.
What to see
The church is named in a notarial act of 1188 as a suffragan of Sant'Olcese. In the fifteenth century it was united in a single parish with that of Comago, and was separated again only in 1639. The plan is of three naves on a Latin cross; in the seventeenth century bad weather forced the rebuilding of the roof of the choir and of the Crucifix chapel.
The vault frescoes are of the nineteenth century, the work of the ornamental painter Achille de Lorenzi, while those above the choir and in the presbytery are by Luigi Gainotti. It is a valley parish church, without pretensions, holding the things a community bought over eight centuries.
Visiting
The church is in the hamlet of Manesseno, in the municipality of Sant'Olcese, in the val Polcevera behind Genoa; it is a parish church and opens for services. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
In front of the Maragliano statue take a step back, or rather three. Those sculptures were made to go out in procession: they had to read from a distance, from below, in movement and often by candlelight. Close up they look simplified; at the distance they were meant for they become something else, and that is the only right way to look at them.