Those who built used to leave the date where nobody would read it. In this oratory it is written in the roof space, the dark gap between the vaults and the roof, and it says 1655: it is held to be the year the building was made anew, or at least deeply transformed. The same date also appears on an outside wall.
What to see
An oratory with this title was already here in 1585, but of what it was like before almost nothing is known. It was the seat of the confraternity of the Annunciation, and like all Ligurian oratories it was above all a hall: a single wide room without columns, made to gather the members and to keep the furnishings of the processions.
Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, Napoleonic troops damaged it. It is not an isolated case: confraternity oratories were exactly the buildings armies requisitioned most readily, because a big room with no internal divisions is a ready-made store or barracks.
Visiting
The oratory is in via Santissima Annunziata, at Spotorno, and depends on the parish church of the same name; it opens for services and for the confraternity's activities. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Walk round the building and look for the date carved on the outside wall. That is where a building site signs itself: not with the architect's name, which there almost never was, but with the year the work was finished. In a village church that figure is often the most reliable document in existence.
