Of the fourteenth-century church only the red bell tower survives: five storeys, a spire on top, three tiers of triple-light windows, some of them walled up in the seventeenth century. The rest was pulled down in 1535 to build the present church, a Latin cross with a dome. The facade was shifted eastwards in 1655 and rebuilt in 1916 in Neo-Renaissance forms, to a design by Luigi Guglielmo Camogli, a Varazze man. Not far off, remains of the first Romanesque Sant'Ambrogio emerge, swallowed by the twelfth-century town wall and already named in a document of 1139.
What to see
The interior has three aisles, with chapels and six Baroque side altars of the eighteenth century. Giuseppe Isola frescoed the central nave with Stories of Saint Ambrose and the Evangelists in the pendentives of the dome; the transepts are by Lazzaro De Maestri. On the high altar stands the Assumption of the Virgin, a marble figure carved by Francesco Maria Schiaffino in 1740, and Antonio Quinzio and Francesco Semino also worked in the apse basin.
In the right aisle, fourth chapel, there is a sixteenth-century gold-ground polyptych by Giovanni Barbagelata, with Saint Ambrose among saints and music-making angels; in the transept, the Apparition of Christ to Saint Gregory by Orazio De Ferrari. On the left, the town's patron saint, Catherine of Siena, is a statue by Anton Maria Maragliano, and a fresco by Santino Tagliafichi shows the blessed Jacopo da Varazze, author of the Golden Legend, making peace between the Genoese factions. Luca Cambiaso painted the panel of the Virgin with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Francis; Antonio Brilla carved the statues of 1873.
Visiting
The collegiate church stands on Piazza Sant'Ambrogio, inside the line of Varazze's medieval walls, a few minutes from the seafront. Its forecourt is paved in risseu, the black and white pebble mosaic that in Liguria almost always precedes a village church, and beside it opens the oratory of San Giuseppe e della Santissima Trinità. It is a working parish church: the useful hours are those around Mass, and during services it is better to stay at the back. The organ, with electric action, is the work of the Inzoli firm of Crema, which in 1983 built it around a Turin instrument of the 1930s.
Our editors' tip
Come in at the back and stay a minute under the dome before you look at the chapels: from there you can see how the church was rebuilt and reoriented around the old bell tower, which stayed where it was. Then go out and walk right round it to the medieval wall: the blocks of the first Romanesque church are still inside it.