Basilica di San Giovanni Battista, Finale Ligure site features

The facade carries four figures, and they are attributed. Statues of San Giovanni Battista, of Saints Peter and Paul, of Hope and of Faith, by the sculptor Bartolomeo Bagutti.

The dome is dated and measured. Twenty-four metres, built in 1780 by Giuseppe Barella with the participation of the Genoese artists Simone Cantoni and Emanuele Andrea Tagliafichi. It is the one dimension any source read for this page gives for the building.

Inside, the columns are the structural signature. Three naves, divided by two rows of paired columns — colonne binate — in imitation of Genoese models of the first half of the seventeenth century. The twelve chapels of the naves are frescoed by Giacomo Picco.

The painting is concentrated in three places. On the counter-facade, three large frescoes of 1808 by Paolo Gerolamo Brusco — the Baptism of Jesus, John the Baptist preaching on the banks of the Jordan, and the Glory of the Precursor; the same painter did the presbytery vault, the paintings of the central apse window and the three large pictures above the entrance doors. The central nave's decorative painting is Giuseppe Passano's, of 1830: Scenes from the life of the Precursor among ranks of angels. And the transept vault was frescoed in 1693 by Giovanni Battista Merano.

Then the individual works, chapel by chapel. Fourth chapel of the right nave: a canvas of the Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, mid-seventeenth century. The two transept chapels: a Madonna and saints by Domenico Bocciardo and the Glory of Saint Nicholas of Bari by Merano. The presbytery: a high altar in polychrome marble of 1767, of the Genoese sculptural school, with an eighteenth-century choir. Fourth chapel of the left nave: sculpture by Antonio Brilla, Jesus gives the keys to Peter, and a crucifix by Anton Maria Maragliano. The pulpit is Pietro Ripa's, from the second half of the eighteenth century.

The seventeenth-century view of Finalmarina

In the sacristy, the recently restored canvas of Sant'Erasmo e San Nicolao carries in its lower part a view of Finalmarina and of the Finalese in the seventeenth century. It is the most unexpected thing in the church: a townscape of the place you are standing in, painted when the building was new.

The paired columns

Three naves divided by two rows of paired columns, in imitation of Genoese models of the early seventeenth century. Doubling the columns is what gives the nave its rhythm, and it is a deliberate quotation of Genoa rather than a local habit.

The dome of 1780

Twenty-four metres, by Giuseppe Barella with Simone Cantoni and Emanuele Andrea Tagliafichi — two architects of the Genoese neoclassical generation working on a church begun a century and a half earlier.

Maragliano's crucifix and Brilla's keys

Both in the fourth chapel of the left nave: a crucifix by Anton Maria Maragliano, the Genoese wood sculptor, and Antonio Brilla's Jesus gives the keys to Peter.

The 1904 Bernasconi organ

On the cantoria on the right wall of the presbytery, built in 1904 by Cesare Bernasconi and his son Giovanni, and restored in 2002 by Graziano Interbartolo and Giuseppe Fontana. Pneumatic action, a window console with two keyboards of 61 notes and a straight 27-note pedalboard; the case, with a cornice on two Corinthian pilasters, shows 25 principal pipes under a false curtain carved in wood.

Twelve frescoed chapels

All twelve chapels of the naves were frescoed by Giacomo Picco — which is why the side aisles read as a continuous decorative scheme rather than a series of unrelated commissions.