Above the altar of this oratory is a six-panel polyptych that came from no famous workshop: local craftsmen made it, and we know who paid for it and when. One Micaelis Cassini de Brigali commissioned it on the second of March 1544. It is art as villages really produced it, ordered by a fellow villager.
What to see
In the central panel is the Madonna of the Snow with the Child, whom the confraternity celebrated on the fifth of August, and at the sides saint Bartholomew and saint Lawrence; in the other compartments the Pietà, the Madonna with saint John the Baptist, Christ seated on the sepulchre, the archangel Gabriel and the Annunciate. On the right wall there is also an oil of saint Anthony abbot of the early sixteenth century, brought here from another church and restored so as to bring back its original colours.
The building is of the sixteenth century and stands raised above the double arch of the fountain, facing the parish church and the castle of the Lizard: in the square of Apricale everything is stacked. It was the seat of the confraternity, and in the eighteenth century it was plastered and decorated in baroque forms. The front has four pilasters with corinthian capitals and a large elliptical oculus above the door.
Visiting
The oratory is in the main little square of Apricale, next to the town hall, in the hinterland of Ventimiglia; it opens for services and during the village's events. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Look at the central panel of the polyptych and find the faithful painted beside the Madonna. They are not filler figures: in a work commissioned and paid for by local people, whoever paid ended up inside it. You are looking the people of sixteenth-century Apricale in the eye, and that is exactly why they wanted it.