Chiesa parrocchiale di San Lorenzo, Varigotti site features

The outside is deliberately plain, and banded. The facade has simple lines and is decorated with bicoloured horizontal bands in typical Ligurian style — the striped manner found along this coast.

The tower is the oldest thing here by three centuries. Late Gothic, inherited from the earlier church on the site and remodelled since. (The record also states that the present bell tower belongs to an original church of 1578-1585 which then became the canonica; its two statements about the tower's predecessor do not agree, and what both support is that the campanile is late Gothic and older than the Baroque church around it.)

The plan is a single nave with one chapel and a dome. A chapel set against the left side, surmounted by a dome — the only vertical emphasis in an otherwise low, simple building.

Four works inside are singled out. A polyptych of San Lorenzo of 1584; a wooden tabernacle of the sixteenth century; a seventeenth-century canvas of the Madonna del Rosario; and a triptych of the Virgin with San Lorenzo and Sant'Antonio.

And the oratory next door completes the group. The oratorio di Sant'Antonio Abate stands beside the church, a few metres from the beach: a single nave with a barrel vault, a facade lightened by three large windows and as plain as the church's, which bore a painting above the entrance, by now completely erased. It is the seat of the confraternity of the same name.

The polyptych of 1584 and the men who paid for it

San Lorenzo with the palm and the gridiron; to the left San Pietro with the keys, to the right his brother Sant'Andrea. In the cartouche above St Andrew are the date and the commissioners — the provost Pietro Averio and the massari Giorgio Mendari and Battista Mauri. Above San Lorenzo, the Madonna and Child with a coral necklace, flanked by San Bernardo with the devil on a chain and San Benedetto; in the cimasa, God within the triangle of the Trinity. Restored in 1954 and again in 2021.

The late Gothic campanile

The one piece of the earlier church still standing, and visibly older than everything attached to it. The comune's own monuments list describes this church as Baroque in form with a late Gothic bell tower, which is exactly how it reads from the road.

The banded Ligurian facade

Bicoloured horizontal bands on simple lines. The same striping appears on churches all along this coast and it is the clearest regional marker on the building.

The domed side chapel

A single chapel against the left side of the nave, surmounted by a dome. In a one-nave church this is where the architectural interest is concentrated.

The oratory beside it

Sant'Antonio Abate: single nave, barrel vault, three large windows in the facade, and above the door the ghost of a painting now completely erased. Seat of its confraternity, and a few metres from the beach.