When the confraternity dissolved in 1947, this oratory became a garage. Not a parish hall, not a tool store: a garage, with cars inside. It stayed one for half a century, until a restoration at the end of the nineties recovered it and turned it into a conference hall.
What to see
The building was raised in 1741, along with the confraternity, at the will of the parish priest of the day. It has a single nave with a square presbytery, some eighteen metres long in all, and stands about a hundred metres in front of the parish church of San Pietro, in the hamlet of San Pietro d'Olba.
On the front, between the door and the rose window, is a painting of the two titular saints, Philip and James. It is the only element that still declares, from outside, what this building was before it became everything else.
Visiting
The oratory is in via Ferriera, at San Pietro d'Olba, municipality of Urbe, in the Savona Apennines; today it is a public hall, so you go in for meetings and events. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the painting above the door and remember it stayed there the whole time. When there were cars inside, the two saints were still on the front, above the shutter. It is the detail that makes these changes of use less dramatic than we tell them: buildings change trade, and meanwhile they keep the name of the previous one written on them.