In the chapel on the left, at the head of the nave, there hung for years a Crucifixion attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Younger, perhaps a copy of a lost panel by his father. What stops you is the arithmetic: on Calvary there are four crosses, not three, in a Flemish landscape that has nothing to do with the Val di Magra. Given by a wealthy family and hidden during the Second World War to keep it out of reach, the panel was stolen in 1981 and recovered by the Carabinieri a few months later. It is now kept somewhere safer.
What to see
The present church is seventeenth-century, late Renaissance in style, built over the remains of an earlier place of worship. On the Baroque facade the portal carries a relief of 1671 showing the penitent Magdalene and the donor who paid for it. Inside, three naves are divided by eight columns of Carrara marble which, according to some sources, came from the church of Santa Maria Assunta at Luni; the choir was assembled in the nineteenth century using material from the town's old bishop's palace. The vault was frescoed by Luigi Agretti, a painter from La Spezia, and a nineteenth-century Serassi organ sits above the entrance.
The altars deserve a slow circuit. In the right nave, at the third altar, a relief from the early sixteenth century shows the Crucifix with the Virgin and the holy women. In the apse are sculptures by Francesco del Mastro of Carrara: the enthroned Madonna of the Snow with the Child, flanked by the Magdalene and Saint John the Evangelist. Left of the presbytery hangs a Crucifixion long given to Anthony van Dyck and now more often assigned to a Genoese follower. In the left nave, the Madonna of Suffrage by Domenico Fiasella stands between a relief of 1772 and a 1667 carving of Saint Bartholomew, Saint Stephen and Saint Jerome.
Visiting
The church stands on piazza del Parlamento, at the top of Castelnuovo Magra, a short walk from the tower of the castle of the bishops of Luni. It is about ten minutes from the Sarzana motorway exit, but leave the car in the parking areas below the village: the old centre is one narrow street. This is a working parish of the Bassa Val di Magra vicariate, so it opens for services and stays accessible for much of the day; in the cold months, aim for the morning.
Our editors' tip
Find the painting of San Fedele, patron of the town, at the second altar. The saint is in the foreground, but the point is the background, where an eighteenth-century painter recorded Castelnuovo Magra as it then looked. Compare it with the profile of the village you have just walked up through: less has changed than you expect. Then step out into the square and look west, over the plain of Luni.