In 1880 the church of San Siro was cut through by a road. Room was needed for the new provincial route running from Vezzano to Buonviaggio and on to La Spezia, today the state road 330 di Buonviaggio, and the building, already mentioned in the twelfth century and put up in late Gothic forms, was partly demolished. In the same year the parish lost its seat: the title passed to the church of Nostra Signora del Soccorso, at Vezzano Superiore, which still holds it.
What to see
What survives of San Siro is above all the bell tower, and that is where you go looking for the rest: in its masonry you can still read the traces of the pointed brick arches that divided the three naves. The tower was also the way in: that was the passage to the interior, an oddity that now helps you picture the lost plan, three naves with a flat apse.
The painted piece is elsewhere. A fragment of fresco from these walls, an Annunciation of the sixteenth century, is kept in the parish church of Nostra Signora del Soccorso at Vezzano Superiore. It is all that is left of the decoration, and the only way to see something more than bare wall.
Visiting
There is no visit in the usual sense: San Siro is no longer a place of worship and what can be seen of it stands in the open, along the main road. The bell tower is looked at from the roadside, with the care that traffic demands. To complete the picture, go up to Vezzano Superiore, where Nostra Signora del Soccorso inherited both the title and the fresco: two stops in a single story, and the second explains the first.
Our editors' tip
We suggest looking first at the point where the carriageway now runs: you see at once how little room was left for the church and why, in the nineteenth century, the road won. It is a small and very clear case of how new roads rewrote the villages of the Val di Magra.