Chiesa di San Lorenzo (Punta Crena), Varigotti site features

It is a single nave, and the two long walls are six hundred years apart. That is the thing to look at here, and it is visible from outside.

The upslope wall is the old one. The record puts it earlier than the year 1000 — older than the charter, older than the Lérins monks, older than the building's own enlargement.

The seaward wall is fourteenth-century, and it has doors. Two doors in Gothic style open in it, and the brick cross-vault of the sacristy belongs to the same period.

The east end is a square apse with single-light windows. A square apse rather than a rounded one, lit by monofore — the narrow single openings of Romanesque and early Gothic building, which is what gives the interior its light.

And the roof is the newest thing in it. A bomb in the Second World War damaged it and it stayed broken open for many years. Restoration works began in 1995.

A wall older than the year 1000

The upslope wall of the nave. Everything else here has a century attached to it; this one is simply dated as earlier than the millennium, which makes it the oldest standing fabric in Varigotti.

Two Gothic doors on the sea side

The wall facing the sea is the more recent half of the building, fourteenth-century, and two doors in Gothic style open in it. The sacristy's brick cross-vault is of the same campaign.

The square apse and its monofore

A square east end — not the usual semicircle — lit by single-light windows. It is the detail that dates the building type as much as the masonry does.

The view the church was built for

The site is mid-slope on Punta Crena, directly above the baia dei Saraceni. The monastery was placed over a working harbour; the harbour silted and the church stayed, so the view now explains the building's position better than anything inside it.

What is not here any more

The sarcophagus of the third or fourth century and the other imperial and early-medieval finds from this site are in the Museo Archeologico del Finale at Finalborgo, which is also the operator that guides visits to this promontory.