Basilica di San Giovanni Battista, Finale Ligure historical timeline

This church was built slowly and decorated for two hundred years, which is why it reads as Baroque with a neoclassical dome on it. The shell went up from 1619, in the Spanish century, when Finalmarina was a town of its own and the marquisate was a link in the Cammino spagnolo; the fittings arrived in waves, each dated and most of them attributed. What a visitor meets is therefore not one campaign but a sequence: a seventeenth-century plan quoting Genoa, an eighteenth-century altar and dome, nineteenth-century fresco cycles, and a twentieth-century organ. The one thing that records the beginning is in the sacristy -- a canvas whose lower register shows the town as it looked while the walls were still going up.

Chronology

1. 1619 Construction begins. The church rises in Finalmarina, then an autonomous comune, and becomes its parish church; its three naves on paired columns quote Genoese models of this same decade.
2. 1693 Giovanni Battista Merano frescoes the transept vault. He also painted the Glory of Saint Nicholas of Bari in one of the transept chapels, so his hand accounts for two of the things to look up at.
3. 1767 The high altar in polychrome marble is installed, work of the Genoese sculptural school, with an eighteenth-century choir behind it. It is the focal point of the presbytery today.
4. 1780 Giuseppe Barella builds the dome, twenty-four metres, with the participation of the Genoese architects Simone Cantoni and Emanuele Andrea Tagliafichi. It is the element that fixes the church's outline on the Finalmarina skyline.
5. late 1700s Pietro Ripa makes the pulpit, in the second half of the century. It stands in the nave among the paired columns.
6. 1808 Paolo Gerolamo Brusco paints the three large frescoes of the counter-facade — the Baptism of Jesus, John the Baptist preaching on the banks of the Jordan and the Glory of the Precursor — and also the presbytery vault, the central apse window and the three large pictures over the entrance doors. They are what a visitor sees on turning round at the door.
7. 1830 Giuseppe Passano executes the decorative painting of the central nave, Scenes from the life of the Precursor among ranks of angels. With Picco's twelve chapels, it completes the interior as one scheme.
8. 1904 Cesare Bernasconi and his son Giovanni build the organ on the cantoria of the presbytery's right wall, with pneumatic action, two 61-note keyboards and a 27-note pedalboard. Its display of twenty-five principal pipes sits under a false curtain carved in wood.
9. 2002 The organ is restored by Graziano Interbartolo and Giuseppe Fontana — which is why it is a playing instrument rather than a case.

What has been conserved

Two restorations are on the record and both are recent. The organ was restored in 2002, a little under a century after Cesare and Giovanni Bernasconi built it, and the sacristy canvas of Sant'Erasmo e San Nicolao is described as recently restored — which matters more than it sounds, because its lower register is the seventeenth-century view of Finalmarina and the Finalese, the only topographical document in the building. The sacristy also keeps other canvases of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nothing read for this page records war damage, fire or structural failure here: the church's history is one of accumulation rather than loss, which is unusual on this coast and is the reason so many dated, attributed works sit in one interior.

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