Saint Roch is the saint invoked against plagues, and a mountain village that builds him a sanctuary is saying something precise: the doctor does not get here. This building was born from the devotion of the people of Buggio to him and to Our Lady of Sorrows, and the great feast remains the sixteenth of August.
What to see
The building is of the second half of the eighteenth century and has all the characteristics of rural and mountain sanctuaries: modest size, simple forms, no architectural ambition. They are buildings meant to be reached on foot by a few scattered families, and built with whatever was at hand.
It stands in the hamlet of Buggio, in the upper val Nervia, one of the most secluded places in the western Ligurian hinterland, near the border with Piedmont and with France. The story the inhabitants hand down concerns a passage of troops: a soldier is said to have fired at the image of the Madonna, and to have died in an accident shortly afterwards.
Visiting
The sanctuary is above Buggio, a hamlet of Pigna; you get there by narrow roads and it opens mainly for the mid-August feast and on particular occasions. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the door of the church: they say the hole left by that bullet is still there. A hole in old wood can be many things, and nobody has ever checked. But what counts is that the village decided which story to tell, and has been telling it for generations while pointing at a precise spot.