The church of the Immaculate Conception was born of a vow: in 1631 the people of Ovada made it to the Virgin for deliverance from the plague. The first stone was laid on 10 June 1640 and consecration came on 26 May 1662. Church and adjoining convent have been in Franciscan hands since they were built, and in the nearby square stands a small statue of the founder of the order.
What to see
The facade you see today is not the seventeenth-century one: it is the result of the rebuilding that followed the fire of 1935, neo-Romanesque, painted in white and black bands, with three doorways, two mullioned windows and a rose window.
Visiting
The interior has changed too: it was once plain and undecorated, as Franciscan rules required. Today the single nave is vaulted, the side chapels were remade in the nineteen-seventies, the same years that produced the new convent, while the high altar is eighteenth-century and has come through everything. On the pillars of the central nave hang two canvases by Geronimo Buffa, a native of Ovada, Christ Crowned with Thorns and the Flagellation of Jesus; the church also keeps works by Giuseppe Palmieri, in the first chapel on the left, and by Emilio Ravera.
Our editors' tip
Keep the date of the fire in mind before you go in: it helps you read the building for what it is, a seventeenth-century church rebuilt almost entirely in the twentieth, where the few things that survived, the high altar and the Buffa canvases, matter more than the front.