This oratory is today the municipal theatre, and the transformation is less violent than it sounds. Where the altar was there is now the stage: that is, in both cases, the lit point that a whole room looks at together. A confraternity oratory and a village theatre are the same machine, and here you can see it with the naked eye.
What to see
The building was put up in the seventeenth century, almost certainly in connection with the plague epidemics of those years: saint Roch is the saint invoked against contagion, and the centuries of the great plagues are full of oratories named after him. It is small, single-naved, with a lowered barrel vault.
In the second half of the twentieth century the confraternity moved into the parish church next door and the hall became a theatre. The original structure is all still there, except the altar, which was dismantled; the furnishings, on the other hand, are gone, and the wooden statue of the saint was taken into the church, into a side chapel.
Visiting
The building is in corso Bovio, a few metres from the parish church of San Matteo, in the centre of Giusvalla, in the Savona hinterland; today it is a theatre, so you go in for performances and village events. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
From the stalls look at the right-hand wall and find the niche. It is the recess where the statue of saint Roch stood, and it is the only thing nobody converted: too impractical to make use of, too obvious to wall up. In a converted hall it is always the useless detail that tells you what it was before.