This building was the castle stable. It stood on the ridge, at the opposite end from the main body of the fortress, and was in all likelihood built together with it; then, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, alterations turned it into the oratory of the confraternity of the Disciplinanti.
What to see
The company was one of the oldest in the area, perhaps already formed in the thirteenth century, and was male only. In penitential processions the brothers closed the column, walking two by two in a long file, in a white habit and a conical hood pulled over the face, pierced at eye level.
The name comes from the instrument they used: the disciplina, a bundle of metal strips joined by a small chain with which they struck their own shoulders. The earliest date referring to this oratory is 1573, noted in the account book beside the donation of a piece of land. In the apostolic visit of 1585 the inspector wrote that the roof was most unseemly and rainy, and that the floor was bare earth and unfinished.
Visiting
The oratory is at San Michele, in Giustenice, in the hinterland of Pietra Ligure; the confraternity dissolved in the nineteen-sixties and with it almost all the papers disappeared. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Go into the parish church of San Michele, next door, and look in the west nave for a fragment of fifteenth-century fresco: it shows a brother at prayer, in his tunic, with the disciplina beside him. It is the only face left of a company that lasted perhaps seven centuries and ended when television already existed.