Basilica di San Biagio, Finalborgo site features

The campanile is older than everything attached to it. Octagonal, with slender bifore, it belonged to the Gothic church of 1372-1375 and the seventeenth-century building simply kept it.

And the old apse is still there, squeezed. The apse and apsidal chapels of the fourteenth-century church have been partially conserved in the short space between the seventeenth-century building and the walls of the Borgo. It is the kind of survival that only happens when a new church is set at an angle to the old one.

Above the middle portal is a marquis. The funerary monument of the last marquis of the Del Carretto family, commissioned by his heir Giovan Andrea Doria and carried into San Biagio only in 1805, when the church of Santa Caterina was confiscated by Napoleon and used to billet troops. The statue is by Battista Orsolino, of the sculptural school of Taddeo Carlone.

The presbytery holds the thing to come for. The high altar of 1799, by Pasquale Bocciardo with the help of his uncle Andrea Casareggio, with whom he shared a workshop in via Giulia in Genoa. Its famous peculiarity is the drape of the table, which seems to be embroidered cloth and is in reality pure marble. The balustrade beside it is his too: four angels supporting a cloth decorated with fine burin work.

The walls were painted late and twice. Frescoed and stuccoed in 1878 by Francesco Semino and Domenico Buscaglia — the dome and the presbytery vault — and resumed in 1911 by Luigi Gainotti and Antonio Bertolotto.

A marble drape that looks like cloth

On the high altar of 1799 by Pasquale Bocciardo. The source calls it the altar's famous peculiarity: the table's drape seems to be of embroidered cloth but is in reality pure marble.

A saint repainted into another saint

The triptych of the Mystic Marriage of saint Catherine of Alexandria, of the school of Bernardino Fasolo, was made for the Disciplinanti of Santa Caterina and brought here in 1626 when the two confraternities united. A rich frame was added — and san Gottardo was modified into san Biagio by putting a carder's comb in his hand.

The octagonal Gothic campanile

With slender bifore, kept from the church of 1372-1375 when that was demolished for the present building, which stands at ninety degrees to it. Part of the Gothic apse survives in the gap between the new church and the town wall.

The pulpit and the Vision of Ezekiel

Attributed to Pasquale Bocciardo, the 1764-1765 marble pulpit is described as curious and fanciful; on it he carved the Vision of Ezekiel with the divine chariot and the tetramorphs.

The flood saint, who is also on the gate

A canvas of san Giovanni Nepomuceno, patron of Bohemia and protector against floods, by Giuseppe Paganelli da Bergamo of 1798. The same saint is painted on the inner surface of Porta Testa — the face through which the waters of a sudden flood would burst in.

An altar built partly out of a castle

The support under the Madonna delle Grazie of 1723, perhaps by Pietro Ripa, has columns faced in marble comprising material reused from the nearby site of Castel Gavone.