The parish church of Olivetta San Michele is dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua, who is also the patron of the municipality and is celebrated on 13 June. It began as an oratory and was heavily bombed in 1944: this is the border, and the war came through here in earnest.
What to see
Partly rebuilt after the war, the church was frescoed again by Mario Raimondo, a painter from Dolceacqua whom everyone called Barbadirame. The finest piece is the Crucifixion in the apse; outside, on the front, stands a marble statue of the titular saint.
Visiting
The church is in the main village, the centre of a scattered municipality at a little under 300 metres in the Bevera valley. It is worth arriving with an idea of what you are looking at: an old building remade by twentieth-century hands, in a place that in 1947 lost two of its hamlets to France.
Our editors' tip
Look at the front first and then the apse: the saint's statue outside, Barbadirame's frescoes inside. They are two different periods of the same building, and you can see it with the naked eye.