Almost everything inside this oratory was made by local people. The altarpieces are by Lorenzo Gastaldi, a painter from Triora, and by his father Battista: two generations of the same family painting for the same confraternity, in the same village. The wooden altar is by a carver from Molini di Triora, and a fellow villager paid to have it gilded.
What to see
The building is of 1632 and replaced an earlier seat below the collegiate church. The son's altarpiece, the Imposition of the Name on the Baptist, is signed and dated 1682; the father's shows the Trinity with saints Agnes and Catherine and was commissioned by a local layman thirty years earlier.
There are also works that came from elsewhere: a panel with the Madonna of the Rosary between saints Vincent Ferrer and Dominic, of the sixteenth century, attributed to Luca Cambiaso, and a Saint Nicholas of Tolentino from another church in the village. For the processional case, on the other hand, the confraternity turned to the best wood sculptor in Genoa, Anton Maria Maragliano, who made the statue of the Baptist.
Visiting
The oratory is in via Veneziano Giauni, in the centre of Triora, in the upper Argentina valley; the village is known above all for the witch trials of the late sixteenth century, and those who come up for that usually do not step in here. It opens for services and on particular occasions. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Find the two Gastaldi altarpieces and look at them side by side. It is a family workshop seen in section: father and son, thirty years apart, working for the same patrons in the same room. In museums painters are isolated names; here you watch the trade pass from one generation to the next.