Chiesa della Madonna delle Grazie

U a lovely place

It is a beautiful and intimate church. In it I find the oldest coat of arms of the city of Alassio

It stands on a hill overlooking the center of Alassio. The position, the name of Castè, with which it is still called today, the inscription on an ancient portal, suggests that there was a fortification, a castle that belonged to an unknown feudal lord, even before Alassio was born and the whole area became the property of the Benedictine monks of the Gallinaria island. Perhaps it is from there, where they had lived protected from the high ground and the walls of the castle, that the first inhabitants who founded the Burgus Alaxii on the seashore came from around the year. However, over the centuries the Madonna delle Grazie has not lost its importance. The church, dedicated to the Nativity of Mary, erected in 1266, has always had among the benefactors some of the most important (and rich!) Alassine families. It is enough to go into it to realize it: the rare floor in slate of Ligurian slate and marble, the monumental altar with the splendid altarpiece by Giovanni Carlone, one of the most appreciated Genoese painters of the seventeenth century and, could not be otherwise, one of the oldest images of the coat of arms of Alassio. The houses on the sides of the ancient mule track, the church with its black stone portals, the square with the fountain, the tranquility of the place, the attachment of the inhabitants to their small village make it, without doubt, one of the most suggestive places of the whole territory of Alassio.