On the front of this chapel is a plaque recording a defeat. The people of Castrofino fought for centuries to get back the title of parish, which they had lost in the middle ages; in 1670, after a long dispute, it was settled once and for all that they depended on the parish of San Cipriano. The verdict was set into their own wall.
What to see
The chapel is at Favareto, believed to be the birthplace of Caffaro, the Genoese politician who in the twelfth century wrote the annals of his city: the first civic chronicle of an Italian commune. It stands on the old road that, leaving the via Postumia, climbed towards the Pertuso pass and then descended into the val Scrivia.
The first record of the building would come from a funerary inscription pointing to the sixth century, though not all scholars accept its authenticity; a diploma of king Berengar, in the tenth century, ties it to the church of San Giovanni at Pavia. After the verdict the decline began: the church fell almost into ruin, and on its remains, in the mid nineteenth century, the present smaller chapel was built.
Visiting
The chapel is in via Giovanni Caminata, in the hamlet of Pedemonte, municipality of Serra Riccò, in the val Polcevera; it was restored in the early two thousands after long abandonment, and opens on particular occasions. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the altarpiece: it is of 2011, painted by Raimondo Sirotti, one of the most important Ligurian painters of the later twentieth century. In a building some would date to the sixth century, and which in the twentieth had been abandoned, somebody decided a few years ago to commission a new picture. It is how a community says the place is not finished.