At the foot of the baptismal font, propped there like any ordinary object, stands an old marble measure for grain and other dry goods: it carries the arms of the Republic of Genoa and the words Comunitas Manarolae, the official standard against which the village checked quantities. It sits in the church of San Lorenzo, also called della Natività di Maria Vergine, built according to the sources in 1338 in Ligurian Gothic style and facing piazza papa Innocenzo IV, in the middle of Manarola.
What to see
The gabled front is of local sandstone: the portal has a Gothic arch and a relief of the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence in the lunette above it, while higher up opens the Carrara marble rose window of 1375, with twelve small columns, close in design to the one at the parish church of San Pietro in Corniglia and attributed to Matteo and Pietro da Campilio. The bell tower stands apart from the body of the church: square in plan, raised in the fourteenth century on the remains of a watchtower used to spot Saracen raids.
The interior, three aisles under a barrel vault, was clad in Baroque forms, and only a restoration at the end of the twentieth century brought part of the Gothic fabric back to view. At the end of the right aisle is a Renaissance tabernacle with a fine fifteenth-century relief; on the apse wall of the central aisle, a Crucifix from the second half of the same century. The two major works are by the Master of the Cinque Terre, an anonymous painter with Lucchese influences probably acquired through Bernardino del Castelletto of Massa: in the left aisle the triptych of Saint Lawrence between Saints Anthony Abbot and Bernard of Clairvaux, which came from the high altar of the sanctuary of Nostra Signora della Salute at Volastra and was restored between 2020 and 2021; on the high altar the polyptych of the Madonna and Child between Saints Lawrence and Catherine of Alexandria and two further saints, back from restoration in 2023.
Visiting
The square in front of the church is the upper part of Manarola, reached by walking up the main street from the little harbour, and it is also one of the few level surfaces in the village. The church is a parish seat in the Riviera vicariate of the diocese of La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato and opens mainly around services. The detached bell tower, a little higher up, remains the landmark you can pick out from anywhere on the slope.
Our editors' tip
We suggest going straight for the marble measure beside the font: it is the object that best explains what Manarola was before tourism, a village weighing its grain under Genoese control. Then stop in front of the rose window, ideally from outside: the twelve small columns hold a thin marble disc that looks completely different seen against the light from within. And if you climb to Volastra, the hamlet above the village, remember that the triptych in the left aisle came from up there: the two churches explain one another.