In 1995 the restoration site was supplied by helicopter, the first job in Liguria to do so. The church of San Lorenzo stands halfway up the Punta Crena headland, above the Baia dei Saraceni, the natural harbour of the Varigotti district of Finale Ligure, and until then its roof had been open for years, ever since a Second World War bomb went through it. What you see is the last surviving piece of a Benedictine monastic settlement of very ancient origins.
What to see
The church has a single nave and a square apse lit by single-light windows. The walls are not all the same age: the one on the uphill side is thought to predate the year 1000, while the seaward side is later and carries two Gothic doorways; the brick cross vault of the sacristy belongs to the same phase, the fourteenth century. It is a building to be read in layers rather than in styles.
The rest of the story is elsewhere. Tombs of late imperial or Byzantine date have been found on the site, along with many finds from the imperial period and the early Middle Ages, among them a sarcophagus of the third or fourth century: they are kept today in the Museo Archeologico del Finale, in the rooms of the former convent of Santa Caterina at Finalborgo. The church appears in documents in 1127, when the bishop of Albenga made grants to the Benedictine monks of Lérins, and again in 1213 for the purchase of land. Served by secular clergy, it remained the parish church of Varigotti until 1586, when the title passed to the church of the same name closer to the village.
Visiting
You reach it on foot from Varigotti, a district of Finale Ligure in the province of Savona: the church sits halfway up the slope and the way is a path, so closed shoes are needed and it is not a walk for flip-flops, however close the sea looks below. At the foot of the headland lies the Baia dei Saraceni, reached from the coastal path. The building is not always open: visits depend on the hours set by those who look after it, and the medieval church has its own website, worth checking before you climb.
Our editors' tip
We go up early in the morning, before the path takes the sun: from the forecourt the bay lies below and the light on the water is still low. Then, to close the circle, we head to Finalborgo and the Museo Archeologico del Finale: the sarcophagus and the finds taken from here are there, and the empty church makes more sense once you have seen what was carried out of it.