Chiesa di San Lorenzo

This guide to the Chiesa di San Lorenzo in Cinque Terre opens around 1204, when a hollowed cedar log carrying relics from the sack of Constantinople is said to have drifted ashore in Portovenere and sat inside the church for two centuries. The story turns on the sixteenth of August, 1399, when a local man named Lucciardo knelt to pray before it with a candle burning below and something in the dark paint began to change. The town's notary, Giovanni di Michele of Vernazza, was called in afterward to gather eyewitnesses and write down what they swore they had seen.