Usually of a church we see the result and not the building site. Not here: the papers survived, and they tell of a job that went badly. Begun with a community meeting in 1698, it dragged on for almost thirty years amid stone that could not be found, bricks judged poor and continual delays.
What to see
The design was entrusted to the architect Gio Batta Marvaldi, and to make room a house and land were bought for twelve hundred Genoese lire. Then the trouble began: there was not enough stone, and the community had to ask the bishop of Albenga for permission to take down an old building and reuse its material.
In 1704 a contract was signed for a supply of bricks, which the architect's son later judged to be of poor quality. The main structure was only closed in 1725, and the floor came later still. The interior is decorated in baroque style; above the marble high altar is a Crucifix attributed to Anton Maria Maragliano, and on the gallery an organ by an organ builder from Albenga.
Visiting
The church is between piazza Matteotti and via Meloria, in the centre of Diano Castello, on the hills behind Diano Marina; it is a parish church and opens for services. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Stand close to a wall and think about the bricks. We rarely know the name of whoever supplied poor material for a church: here it is written in a contract, together with the judgement of the man who rejected it. Churches look as if they were born perfect because building-site quarrels usually do not reach us. This one kept them all.