Eighteen years of building work for the church of a hillside hamlet. The parish church of the Santissima Trinità at Rollo was rebuilt in Baroque style between 1616 and 1634, and the verb matters: rebuilt, not built, because a place of worship already stood here before the 17th-century site opened.
What to see
What you see today is the Baroque fabric that came out of those eighteen years of work, the only fact the sources hand down with certainty about the building. It is worth looking at alongside what surrounds it, because the setting tells the rest.
Rollo lies at 147 metres above sea level, on the slopes of Capo Cervo, and keeps a 16th-century fortified house with a high battered base and four corner watch-turrets, built to spot and repel pirate raids. Nearby stood the old priory of the Benedictine monks of San Martino, owned in the Middle Ages by the abbey on the island of Gallinara: no trace of that religious building survives.
Visiting
You come up from the coast towards Capo Cervo, a few hairpins above Marina di Andora, through olive groves and scattered houses; the hamlet also takes in the locality of Bande Di Là. The church is a working parish church, so its hours follow the services.
Our editors' tip
We would plan the climb for the last weekend of June, when Rollo holds its festival of aromatic herbs: that is the weekend the hamlet genuinely fills up. Then walk over to the fortified house: church and defensive tower, a few dozen metres apart, say everything about how people lived on this coast in the 16th and 17th centuries.