The bell tower at Sori is rated among the finest Baroque campanili in Liguria, and it has a precise birthday: work to raise it began on 15 April 1740, a little over twenty years after the church below it was rebuilt. The parish church of Saint Margaret of Antioch stands in piazza della Chiesa, in the middle of the village. An earlier building stood here around the 12th century, probably Romanesque and sized for the population of the day; from 1143 it depended, like the other churches nearby, on the pieve of San Michele Arcangelo at Pieve Ligure. Independence came on 6 May 1674, when the archbishop of Genoa, Giovanni Battista Spinola, raised it to a provostry and took it out of the pieve's control.
What to see
The present church was built between 1711 and 1714 to a design by Giovanni Antonio Ricca the Younger. The plan is strongly longitudinal, with both the atrium and the presbytery drawn out lengthwise: the eye is pushed towards the altar as if down a telescope. There is a single nave, wide and tall and rectangular, but the corners are rounded off and low chapels open in those angles, cut to a different size from the main chapels ranged along the two long sides. Walk in, then turn back towards the door: the difference between the two families of chapels only reads from there.
Paintings from the 18th century hang on the walls, work of artists from the Ligurian school, roughly contemporary with the building itself. The Second World War damaged the fabric, and a restoration carried out between 2002 and 2003 put it right. Among the priests who led the parish, from 1891 to 1912, was Giacomo Ghio, who left Sori for the archbishop's seat of Urbino-Urbania-Sant'Angelo in Vado and held it until 1931.
Visiting
The church is the seat of the parish of the same name, part of the Bogliasco-Pieve-Sori vicariate of the archdiocese of Genoa: it is a working church, and the calendar of services governs when the doors are open. Anyone arriving at the wrong hour still has piazza della Chiesa, a compact opening in the fabric of the old centre from which the tower can be seen whole. A look from the square and another from the seafront give two different buildings: from a distance only the tower counts, from close up it is the sheer length of the nave.
Our editors' tip
We come in the late afternoon, when low light catches the tower from the side and separates its cornices and stacked orders: that is the moment when you see why it is ranked with the best of Ligurian Baroque. Inside, we suggest walking the nave to the far end and giving the eighteenth-century canvases time. They are local workshop pieces rather than famous masterpieces, and that is exactly why they say something: they show what a seafaring community could afford in the Settecento, a Genoese architect and a tower of that height.