The church keeps a drinking glass: by local tradition it is the one from which Pope Pius VII was given water on his way back from France, after his imprisonment. San Pantaleo stands in the hamlet of the same name, on via San Pantaleo, in the hills of Zoagli, and was built in the twelfth century in Romanesque style along the line of the Via Romana; the first official mention of it is a will drawn up in its favour on 9 May 1484.
What to see
The fabric is plain twelfth-century Romanesque: stone, small proportions, no attempt to impress. This is a roadside church, born along the Via Romana that linked the coast to the inland valleys, and its documented history begins with that bequest of 1484, a sign that by the fifteenth century it already mattered to the people who lived here.
Still, the thing people come to look at is the Pius VII glass, a minor object and a stubborn memory of a papal passage along the Riviera. It is the kind of secular relic that says more than many memorial tablets: someone, on one particular day, stopped here and asked for a drink.
Visiting
San Pantaleo is a high hamlet of Zoagli, above the Aurelia and the Tigullio sea, reached by narrow roads. The church is small and no opening hours are recorded: it is worth checking on the spot or asking the parish, and reckoning with finding it locked outside service times.
Our editors' tip
We go up on foot rather than parking as close as possible: the final climb explains better than any sign why a twelfth-century church ended up exactly there. From that height the relationship between the coast and the hills behind it becomes obvious.