On 29 June 1076 bishop Diodato of Albenga granted the monks of San Pietro in Varatella a mill in Toirano: it is the first document that names them, drawn up with the assent of twenty-two cathedral canons and twelve milites Sancti Ioannis led by Conradus, advocate of the bishopric. The abbey, though, had been up there for some time, founded by Benedictines before the year 1000; local tradition puts it as far back as the Carolingian age, without a single charter to confirm it.
What to see
What you reach on the summit of Monte Varatella is not a monumental church but a stone building, much altered over the centuries, with a sundial painted in the nineteen-eighties after an earlier one that had been lost. Inside there are several rooms, some of them still used to shelter pilgrims, while the church has a single nave and a vault carried on segmental arches of the Romanesque period, the one element that gives away the real age of the place.
The presbytery keeps a fifteenth-century fresco of Saint Peter in pontifical vestments; in front of it stands an altar of Finale stone, the pale calcarenite quarried a short way west along the coast, consecrated in 1937. The rest is told by the abbey's fortunes: decrees from the bishops of Albenga increased its religious and territorial weight, the Benedictines lived here permanently until 1313, then Carthusians from the charterhouse of Casotto took their place, and when in 1495 the order of Saint Bruno moved down to the valley floor near Toirano, a slow but steady abandonment of the mountain began.
Visiting
You get here on foot, climbing from the valley floor as the Toirano procession has done for centuries: the abbey sits on the summit, in a commanding position, and the view over the Val Varatella and the sea repays the climb. This is not a museum with opening hours to check, but a place of worship still in use, open above all for its celebrations. The most keenly felt is on the first Sunday of May, joined by a procession that returns every five years; historically the valley pilgrimage came up on 1 August, for the feast of Saint Peter in Chains.
Our editors' tip
We climb early, in the first hours of light and with a full water bottle: there is little shade on the ridge and in summer the limestone throws the heat back at you. If you have a whole day, close the loop down below, between the caves of the Val Varatella and the village of Toirano, the valley floor the Carthusians moved to when they left the mountain: from up there, looking down, you see at once why.