In 1297 the list of parishes of the diocese of Luni records a «cappella de Podencolo» under the pieve of Santa Maria Assunta at Pignone: it is the first written trace of the building now known as the church of San Cristoforo, at Ponzò, one of the upland hamlets of Riccò del Golfo di Spezia. The original structure goes back to the fourteenth century, but what you visit today is the result of two later campaigns, one in the sixteenth century and one in the eighteenth, which enlarged and re-roofed the medieval fabric without erasing it.
What to see
The sixteenth-century work raised the side walls and opened new semicircular windows. Light was not the only point: more free wall meant more room for altars. A description written in 1720 lists seven of them along the flanks, dedicated to the Madonna del Rosario, to Saint Bernard, to the Annunciation, to Saint Andrew, to Saint Thomas and to the Holy Trinity. The altar of the patron saint, Christopher, was almost certainly the last to arrive: dedications followed family devotion rather than any overall plan.
In the second half of the eighteenth century the wooden truss roof gave way to a vaulted ceiling carried on six arches and the pillars beneath them; the high altar was rebuilt in the same campaign. That is the arrangement the interior still keeps: a single nave measured out by the rhythm of the arches, lit through windows cut two centuries earlier.
Visiting
Ponzò lies inland behind the gulf, on the ridges that divide the coast from the Val di Vara, and you reach it by narrow roads climbing from the valley floor at Riccò del Golfo: leave the car at the edge of the hamlet and walk the last stretch. The church is the parish seat of the Bassa Val di Vara vicariate, in the diocese of La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato, and like every hamlet parish it lives by service times: outside Mass it may well be locked, and it is worth asking in the village.
Our editors' tip
Our advice is not to stop at the church. Under San Cristoforo come the oratories of San Bartolomeo and Santa Caterina at Ponzò, Santa Croce beside the cemetery, San Genesio at Camedone, San Rocco at Bovecchio and the church of the Sacro Cuore at Piandibarca: small buildings, often shut, which taken together explain better than any information panel how a community scattered across many hamlets worked, with the mother church high up and a chapel within reach of each cluster of houses. Half a day on foot covers a good part of them, and it is the best way to read this corner of the Spezia hinterland.