This church did not fall down: it sank. Century after century the Graveglia torrent laid down material and raised the valley floor, until all that was left showing of the Romanesque building was the upper part of the apse, a piece of the south wall and a little of the front. Whoever built the later oratory used that protruding apse as the base of their bell tower.
What to see
The church is almost certainly the chapel of Beverino that appears in the tithe records of the late thirteenth century as a dependency of a local pieve. The masonry is of squared blocks, with Romanesque cornices; the original plan, quadrangular and oriented as the rule requires from west to east, measured a dozen metres by six and is still readable beneath the later building.
Local tradition, taken up by Ubaldo Formentini too, holds that the first nucleus of Beverino was born around this church: a road settlement, at the head of a ford over the torrent. Only later was the castle built on the nearby hill, attested in the sources from 1202. On the night between the thirty-first of August and the first of September 2018, lightning destroyed the upper part of the bell tower, which still had no lightning conductor.
Visiting
The church is in the hamlet of San Cipriano, municipality of Beverino, in the lower val di Vara; it is subsidiary to the parish church of Beverino and opens for services. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Look in the apse for the three splayed windows: only their upper part shows, because the sill is underground. Those windows are a ruler. They measure exactly how much the valley floor has risen since they were opened, and no information board could explain it better.