One corner of the parish church is sliced clean off, and not on a builder's whim: on 23 April 1945, during the liberation of Arcola, the road between the church and the wall of the monumental cemetery was too narrow for an American tank heading for La Spezia, so the angle was cut away to let it through. Nobody had ever been given permission to widen that bottleneck before, not even for the buses; the Americans did not ask.
What to see
The church stands at Baccano, a hamlet of Arcola, and it is the mother church of the whole community: a bull of Pope Eugene III, dated 1149, confirms it among the possessions of the abbey of Leno, near Brescia. The pre-Romanesque building was reworked in the Gothic period, and that is how it reads today: three naves, a square apse and, flanking it, matching chapels opened by wide pointed arches. Above the door runs the inscription Terribilis est locus iste, “how dreadful is this place”, Jacob's line at Bethel, used by medieval churches to mark where the ordinary stops.
Inside are a fourteenth-century marble triptych with the Virgin between saints Peter and John the Baptist, and a sixteenth-century oil panel of Mary enthroned with the Child among saints Margaret, Nicholas, Bernardino of Siena and Stephen the protomartyr, given by the wardens of the sanctuary of Nostra Signora degli Angeli in Arcola. The statue of Saint Margaret carved by Rino Mordacci is far more recent, 1989. Outside, a fountain of stone and brick was commissioned in 1626 by Giovanni Battista Salvago, bishop of Luni; the wall behind it holds marbles taken from ancient Luni, among them a mask that probably came from a Roman sarcophagus of the second century.
Visiting
Baccano is a few minutes from Arcola and from the main Val di Magra road; the square in front of the church is small, so it is better to leave the car a little earlier and walk the last stretch. This is a working parish in the vicariate of the Media Val di Magra, so opening follows the times of mass: on weekdays it may well be shut outside services.
Our editors' tip
Walk right round the building before you go in. In a few paces you pass from the reused Roman mask to the seventeenth-century fountain and on to the corner shorn off in 1945: three separate ages that left their mark on the same stone, and not one of them has a sign to explain it. It is the best way to understand why a hamlet church is the mother church of the entire municipality.