San Terenzo's parish church keeps a sixteenth-century high relief of Saints Fabian, Roch and Sebastian, the three protectors invoked against the plague. It is older than the building around it: historical sources place the first church here in the seventeenth century, reworked in 1740 and renovated far more thoroughly between 1919 and 1922. It is the seat of the parish of the same name, in the Media Val di Magra vicariate of the diocese of La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato.
What to see
The plan is a single rectangular hall with chapels opening along the sides and a transept that widens the space in front of the presbytery: a straightforward village layout, with no colonnades and no side aisles. The interiors are late Baroque, and it was the building work of the early twentieth century that gave the whole its present appearance.
The relief of the three saints is the piece worth stopping for, partly because it sits oddly with everything else: a sixteenth-century carving older than the walls around it, which survived two building campaigns. Look for it before the stuccoes and the side altars pull your attention away.
Visiting
The church stands in via della Vittoria, in the centre of San Terenzo, a hamlet of Lerici facing the same gulf: you can walk there from Lerici along the coast, or take the buses that come down from La Spezia. It is not a museum and there is no ticket office; as a working parish, access follows the times of services, published on the website of the diocese of La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato. The village has had a rougher history than its seafront suggests: on 28 September 1922 lightning struck the Falconara powder magazine and the explosion wrecked the settlement, killing many.
Our editors' tip
We put this stop in the middle of a walk, not at the end. Leave the church, head down towards the water and within a few minutes you reach Villa Magni, the house on the shore where Percy Bysshe Shelley lived from April to September 1822: two buildings a short distance apart tell the two sides of the place, the fishing village and the retreat for writers and summer visitors. Late afternoon is our choice, when the light comes in low from the west and the beach begins to empty.