Two Medieval Jewels Just Behind the City: The Marinasco and St. Venerius Parish Churches

Leaving behind the city and following the Aurelia in the direction of Genoa you reach Foce pass. From here it is just a short journey to reach Marinasco parish church with its wonderful view over the entire Gulf from the square.
The church, dedicated to St. Stephen Protomartyr, was first recorded in a document in 950, even though unfortunately nothing remains of the religious building built before the year one thousand. The church now has a gothic style appearance with traces of a previous Roman building, altered by modern works, especially inside. The precarious geological situation causing instability of the land where the church was standing is the main reason for having to carry out all those works on the parish church: as the inscription put up on the bell tower informs us it had in fact been necessary to build a new bell tower between 1780 and 1784, using it as a powerful support to prevent the risk of the church collapsing and the entire building was consequently made to face the other way round.
These works therefore left the parish church without a façade, which we can imagine must have been salient, made of sandstone like the rest of the building and with a marble portal and rose window, going by a few eloquent pieces of evidence. The gothic construction ended in three levelled apses, the main one, now the entrance in virtue of the fact of having being turned the other way round as mentioned before, is lower than the side apses. This apse is covered by a lancet vault with marble groins ending on shelves, apparently without other use, carved into geometric figures and monstrous animals.
The walls of the building are made of blocks of well-turned sandstone, with some smaller grey limestone ashlars in between, perhaps taken from the ruins of the Roman building, and a few marble fragments placed here and there. An entrance opens onto the southern side with a lancet arch made with ashlar blocks accurately laid in a radial position with two shaped corbels underneath, the stone on the left bears a beast which is difficult to interpret and the one on the right bears an Agnus Dei tempted by a small demon-like animal. There is a large square-cut stone with a small head in relief above the keystone as well as two other corbels further up suggesting a cover or canopy, evident from the traces left on the wall. Lastly on the right of the portal there is a walled in holy-water font, possibly made of recycled materials.
There is a vigorous Virgin Mary with Child inside possibly once on the façade now lost, clearly a Campione school product and possibly dating back to the middle of the 14th century: the last remains of the decorations on the outside of the building that would have made it quite similar to the churches along the coast of the Cinque Terre.

Instead going eastwards we find St. Venerius’ parish church standing at a distance from the Aurelia in the Pisa direction after the Migliarina district. The place-name ‘La pieve’ (parish church) still now referable to the area including the building, is clear evidence of the important role played by the religious institution in the life of the community. Numerous investigations, also archaeological, have in fact been conducted both in the area and on the church itself to find out about the site before and coinciding with Christianity. Terracotta fragments were found from pre-Roman times as well as remains of buildings from the Roman times, indicating that a sacred building may have been erected on top of a house from the Imperial Age.
The church as it now stands has prevalently Roman architecture, coinciding with records referring to the re-construction of an old unserviceable building commissioned by the Vezzano, local feudal lords in 1084. The simple barn-like facade is opened by a single portal with a crescent shaped archway, above is a double lancet window with its lancet arches and small column with a leafed capital which on the contrary appear to be in gothic style. Still further above is a hollowed out cross, unaligned both with the portal and with the double lancet window.
The church inside has one nave but has two apses opened by double-splayed single lancet windows. The bell tower stands to the right of the church with small rectangular ashlar walls, where the considerable reconstruction works have not touched them, and was probably erected separately from the Roman parish church and only incorporated with the sacred building at a later date. There are no decorations or wide openings on the massive lower part whilst further up more or less where the roof starts there are wide angular pilasters, broken up by a series of suspended arches in terracotta and limestone, the openings above them as well as the pyramid-shaped openings in slate can be certainly attributed to more large-scale works on the church during the first half of the XVII century.