This church was built in 1854 because of cholera. Saint Roch is the saint invoked against contagion, and he had been the saint of the plagues for three centuries; when a new disease arrived, people went looking for the protector they already knew. The saint's job description was updated along with the epidemic.
What to see
The building has a single nave on a Latin cross plan, and stands at Acquabianca, along the provincial road that climbs the valley. The works, begun in the emergency, dragged on until 1865 for lack of funds: the cholera church was finished eleven years after the cholera. It was then enlarged twice in the nineteenth century.
For eighty-one years, from the early twentieth century to the nineteen-eighties, it was an autonomous parish. Almost everything you see today, however, dates from the rebuilding of 1960, which remade the building almost from scratch, and the whole is not in good condition.
Visiting
The church is in the hamlet of Acquabianca, municipality of Urbe, in the Apennines behind Savona; it stands on the road and is seen as you pass, while getting in depends on services. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the road it stands on. Cholera travelled along routes and watercourses, and villages on through-roads caught it first: that is why a hamlet of a few houses, facing a pass road, found itself having to build a church against contagion. The position that brought trade also brought the disease.