An interesting but little known religious site
Situated about halfway along the road from Sanremo to San Romolo, the hermitage, which has very ancient but certainly not precise origins, was perhaps built - according to an almost certainly legendary tradition - by a group of monks from Provence before the Matuzian land was evangelised by Saint Syrian and Blessed Ormisda in the first half of the 4th century.
After becoming a real ruin with the passing of the centuries, the hermitage was restored around 1860 by Count Vincenzo Toffetti, a nobleman of Venetian origin who had come to Sanremo in 1849, who had retired in voluntary isolation in a modest dwelling he had built near the chapel. The count led a particularly secluded and solitary life until his death, which took place on 22 October 1866 in his house near the hermitage.
Nowadays the church has a high altar and two wooden side altars placed under wide arches and overlooked by a large niche carved in the wall with an adjoining burial place surmounted by a wooden aedicule. Of the rich furnishings of the ancient dinner-
The abbey chair, some furniture, a silver censer and other objects from later times, brought to the hermitage by Count Toffetti, have been preserved. Also original are the winter choirs opened laterally along the walls and surmounted by a frescoed vault, the refectory room with a floor covered with granite slabs, a series of sculpted capitals dating back to the pre-existing building, and two open stone well mouths.
During the last century the complex was also able to benefit from a careful restoration promoted in particular by Don Giuseppe Cortona, who used ceramic pieces, recovered inside a villa under demolition in Sanremo, to create an altar and two altars in the crypt and in the atrium of the latter. The crypt contains, among other things, a valuable stoup and a large painting by an unknown artist, in which the Madonna and Child are depicted, flanked by St. Catherine and Queen Mary Christine of Savoy on one side, and St. Dominic and Prince Eugene of Savoy on the other. Finally, near the hermitage there is the presence of a boulder engraved by some cups joined by a small canal, probably dating back to the protohistoric age.
(sources: text by Andrea Gandolfo; images from private archives)