In 1822 a parish priest described this church in an official report and did not hold back: it stands on a high mountain, he wrote, inconvenient to reach for the people and for the priest himself, in more than salubrious air and exposed to lightning. Then he added that the damp of the sea wind does not help. It is the most honest portrait a priest ever made of his own parish.
What to see
The building stands on a hill detached from the rest of Beverone and was put up, at an unknown date, on the remains of a medieval fortification: the position was military before it was religious. It belonged to the rectory of Stadomelli and was detached from it in the second half of the sixteenth century, when an apostolic visitor noted the state of neglect he found it in.
In the same nineteenth-century report we read that the only altar besides the high one was that of the Rosary, without endowment, kept decent by the church wardens on a few alms. In the village there was also a little seminary, housed in the oratory of Sant'Andrea and directed by the parish priest: in 1810 it had twelve pupils, six of theology and six of letters.
Visiting
The church is in the hamlet of Beverone, in the upper val di Vara, and you get there by narrow roads; it is a parish church and opens for services. Twenty minutes, plus the climb.
Our editors' tip
In the forecourt in front of the church there are two deep cisterns. They were not for water: the dead were buried in them, and the practice stopped only in 1810, shortly after the edict of Saint-Cloud required cemeteries to be moved outside settlements. They are there, under your feet, and no sign tells you so.