Around 1830 this oratory was demolished because it was in the middle of the road. The way to Piedmont was being widened, the one that today climbs to the Nava pass, and the building got in the way of the works: they pulled it down and rebuilt it next door, with money from the government of the Kingdom of Sardinia. The state took the church and the state gave it back.
What to see
The first building was of the second half of the fifteenth century, near the settlement of Garsi. In the seventeenth century the local families paid out of their own pockets to make it larger, and that is the building the road would later sweep away. In the rebuilding the front was turned round from how it had been.
From the roof rises a small bell-gable with a little dome covered in slabs of local stone. Inside, on the altar, is a Madonna of the Rosary among saints Dominic, Francis de Sales, Fabian and Sebastian, the work of a local painter who has stayed nameless, datable to the seventeenth century.
Visiting
The oratory is in via IV Novembre, at Chiusavecchia, in the Impero valley, on the road climbing from Imperia towards Piedmont; it opens for services and on particular occasions. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the doorway: it is of the fifteenth century, with a corbelled architrave and a tympanum, and above it a niche. It is the oldest piece of the whole building, centuries older than the wall it is set into: when the oratory was moved, the door was taken apart and put back. Buildings get remade, thresholds are carried along.