The little church of San Bernardo stands on the heights above Armo, near the pass of the same name and not far from the Colle di Nava. Its first building is said to go back to 1641; what you see today is the result of the rebuilding the villagers carried out, on their own initiative, in 1953.
What to see
It is a small mountain church, and its interest lies not in the architecture but in what it stands for: a municipality of a hundred and twenty-four people, the least populated in the province of Imperia, deciding in the middle of the twentieth century to put its high church back on its feet. Around it are the pastures, the ones over which the shepherds of Armo quarrelled for centuries with those of Caprauna, over the Piedmont border.
Visiting
You get there by climbing from the village towards the pass. The right moment is mid-August, when the feast of San Bernardo is held here over three days together with the sagra du pan fritu: the Liguria Region credits it with more than fifty years of history and lists it among the Eventi Autentici Liguri.
Our editors' tip
Outside the feast days it is a silent, empty place, and that is exactly why the climb is worth it: you understand better what it means, for a village this small, to keep a building standing up there.
