The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, which everyone in Ovada calls San Domenico, was founded in 1481 by the Dominican father Giovanni Cagnasso da Taggia, together with the convent behind it; the stone set above the doorway bears the date 1508, perhaps the year the work was finished.
What to see
The gabled facade is very plain: a large semicircular window and, above the doorway, a lunette frescoed with the Virgin and two Dominican saints. Inside the plan is a Latin cross, three naves of four bays each, barrel vaults in the centre and cross vaults at the sides, over a length of 45 metres; the presbytery has a Gothic air and holds a baroque altar that came from far away, from the Genoese church of Santa Maria di Castello, installed here together with its balustrade in 1690.
Visiting
It is worth walking the bays and looking at the altars one by one. On the right are a seventeenth-century Sant'Omobono by an anonymous Genoese painter and the altarpiece of San Vincenzo Ferreri, whose polychrome marble altar carries the arms of Genoa because it was the high altar of the old parish church of Ovada. On the left, in the second bay, stands the altar of San Giacinto, the Dominican patron of the town: below it Ovada itself is painted, with the words protector uvadae. The left transept holds the cenotaph of Santa Colomba, whose remains were taken from the Roman catacombs in the nineteenth century.
Our editors' tip
Do not expect an intact church. Between 1797 and 1815 the Napoleonic occupation turned it first into a barracks and then into a warehouse, and the reconsecration after the Congress of Vienna took place in a building already stripped of its original altars; then on 26 November 1986 a fire badly damaged what was left, including the nineteenth-century choir stalls. The most surprising piece is outside: the Romanesque cloister, its arches walled up, now houses school classrooms.