On the end wall of this church there is a false architecture in gilded stucco, with angels, built to frame a painting. The painting is not there any more: it was lost, and in its place today hangs a banner of the Virgin. A rich frame around an empty space is the thing you notice most on going in, and it tells the story of the place better than anything else.
What to see
The present building is the enlargement of an older church that faced the opposite way; work probably began in the eighteenth century and the interior took its present shape in the nineteenth. It is a single sober hall, with some paintings on the presbytery vault, a high altar of stone and lime and above it a wooden crucifix, originally a processional one.
The font is of Finale stone, and the two side chapels are dedicated to the Sacred Heart and to the Madonna of the Rosary. The finest piece is a wooden processional group of the Transfiguration, of the second half of the nineteenth century, attributed to the Savona sculptor Antonio Brilla.
Visiting
The church is in the hamlet of Magnone, at Vezzi Portio, in the hinterland between Savona and Finale; it was once an autonomous parish, today it is merged with that of Portio, so it opens rarely. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Do not look down on the plaster statues. The original wooden ones were dispersed after the second world war along with other furnishings, and these are what an impoverished parish could afford to put something back where there was nothing. They are worth little and say a great deal: they are the record of a loss, not a tasteless makeshift.