The name is diplomatic rather than devotional: the concord in the title is the one somebody hoped to restore among the people of Albissola Marina, split into two quarters and two rival parishes, San Benedetto and Sant'Antonio Abate. Local tradition holds that in January 1585 the leading heads of household, together with the bishop of Savona Giovanni Battista Centurione, agreed to build a single new church that would hold them together. The land came from the sale made by a fellow villager, Lucrezia Conradi; the foundation stone was laid on 14 April 1590, shortly after work began on Savona's cathedral of the Assunta. The side windows still show Anthony and Benedict, in memory of the two churches they replaced.
What to see
The plan is basilican, with three aisles divided by piers against which two orders of pilasters are set, carrying four segmental arches. The presbytery ends in a semicircular choir as wide as the central nave and contains two barrel-vaulted chapels; two more, with side altars, open along the long walls. The Baroque front you see today is not the sixteenth-century one: it is the rebuilding that followed the damage of the 1887 earthquake, designed by the Roman engineer Giuseppe Coradeschi and executed in marble quarried at Rapolano Terme, in the Siena country.
In the apse stands the marble Madonna della Concordia by the Genoese sculptor Giacomo Antonio Ponsonelli, carved in 1690-91. Among the paintings are two altarpieces by Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo, a Christ crucified between saints Bartholomew, Jude Thaddeus and Longinus painted in 1610 by a very young Giovanni Carlone, frescoes by Paolo Gerolamo Brusco, and a Nativity of 1576 assembled from polychrome ceramic tiles by Girolamo Urbinate and Agostino Salomone. The oddest piece is the processional figure by the Genoese Pasquale Navone: it has an interchangeable arm, and depending on which one is fitted the statue is either the Madonna della Concordia or, with the Child, the Madonna del Rosario. On the wooden gallery above the entrance sits the organ built in 1769 by the Genoese Filippo Pittaluga and reworked in 1875 by Angelo Dessiglioli of Savona to the taste of his day: two manuals of 58 notes, a pedalboard of 15, 32 stops.
Visiting
The church faces the square that carries its name, in the centre of Albissola Marina, a short way from the sea; the oratory of San Giuseppe stands beside it. It is the town's parish church, in the vicariate of Albisola-Varazze within the diocese of Savona-Noli, so it opens for services and Mass times remain the most reliable hours. If you want to look at the side chapels and the organ gallery unhurried, come outside the celebrations.
Our editors' tip
Our advice is to start with the windows: Anthony on one side, Benedict on the other, are the reminder of the two parishes this building was meant to replace, and without that detail it reads as just another good coastal Baroque church. Then find Navone's processional figure and picture it carried with one arm or the other: a workshop solution, practical and slightly disconcerting, that says a lot about how such things were made. And if you happen on a service with the organ in use, stay: the eighteenth-century instrument is worth hearing more than seeing.