Chiesa di San Pietro

This guide to the Chiesa di San Pietro in Porto Venere, Cinque Terre, opens with French troops gutting the church two centuries ago and turning its windows into gun ports trained on the mouth of the gulf. It traces the building much further back, from a Roman-era temple to Venus on this same headland, through a fifth-century Christian church raised over its ruins, to the striped black-and-white Gothic church Genoese masons built between 1256 and 1277. Inside, columns of local black stone still hold up a ceiling worn smooth by nine hundred years of hands and salt air.