This church declares its own age on the door: on the lunette of the portal the date 1489 is impressed, and it is the earliest mention we have of the parish church of Borgoratto. That is no small detail, because for most village churches the first record lies in an archive, not on the building itself.
What to see
In the sixteenth century the apostolic visitor Lelio Garufo surveyed it and noted, besides the high altar, two side altars dedicated to the Virgin and to Paul of Tarsus. Then, in the eighteenth century, the church was rebuilt from scratch in baroque forms, probably to the design of the architect Domenico Belmonte.
Into the new building went back the furnishings and the works of the old one: the canvas of the Madonna of the Rosary and the apse painting with the patron saints of the village. The side altar dedicated to the Mother of Good Counsel is also finely made. The vault frescoes, on the other hand, are recent, painted in the middle of the nineteen-sixties.
Visiting
The church is in the hamlet of Borgoratto, at Lucinasco, on the heights of the Impero valley behind Imperia; it is a parish church and opens for services. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Raise your eyes to the vault and do not dismiss it for being of the twentieth century. That a hill parish was still commissioning a painted cycle in the sixties means that tradition reached almost to our own time: these are among the last church wall paintings made in Italy on an ordinary commission, and nobody looks at them because they are too recent to count as old.