At the gates of hell when downpours devastated the Franco-Italian Roya valley in early October, the painted chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines in La Brigue fascinates with its very raw and daring frescoes from 1492, intact despite the storm.
Designed from floor to ceiling, which earned it the nickname of the “
Sistine Chapel
” of the Alpes-Maritimes, the chapel is an unknown jewel of the end of the Middle Ages, witness to the golden age of the salt road which went up from the Mediterranean towards Italy.
It is also a tourist engine for this village, isolated and located in a region devastated by extraordinary bad weather two and a half months ago.
Read also: The Haute-Roya in search of resilience
"
We came quickly to check on the disaster and miraculously, compared to the destruction we could see the valley had hardly moved, the chapel either
", breathes Cyril Darius, young guide at the tourist office.
With one hand, he pushes the gate and then the doors of the building buried under the snow and reopened for AFP for the first time after the disaster.
There is no lighting.
As the eye gets used to it and soon, a multitude of characters and striking creatures emerge from the 220 m2 painted with four hands, more than 500 years ago, by the priest and painter Giovanni Canavesio and the artist Giovanni Balaison to tell the story of Jesus' life.
"
Not Super-Jesus but almost
"
“
There are all the codes of comics, bad guys with bad faces, good guys with halos.
We can draw a parallel with American comics, it's not Super-Jesus but almost.
These codes made it possible to bring to a naïve reading and to mark the spirits
”, details the guide.
Last point of drinking water before the pass for Italy, Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines served as a stopover for travelers and their horses.
Nowadays, the number of visitors fluctuates between 5,000 and 10,000 per year.
It can pass up to 150 a day in summer, but that was before the departmental road going up into the valley was seriously damaged by torrential rains.
Read also: In Roya and Vésubie, a whole life to rebuild
“
Basically, it was windowless, dark and the atmosphere like when you're at the cinema, glued to your armchair: people must have been flabbergasted because it's quite violent, it shows rather forbidden things like the inside bodies, the cavalcade of vices
”, continues Cyril Darius.
With his flashlight, he sweeps the wall and points to the biblical character of Judas hanged.
A demon with eagle's talons and goat horns seems to tear a baby's body, symbolizing the soul of the traitor, from its panting entrails.
The painting of the Last Judgment is in keeping with it: liars are skewered, the greedy martyred by a winged serpent with the head of a man and characters indulging in lust are caught in the jaw of the Leviathan.
"
A place to discover
"
The licentious scene has disappeared, erased, just like the sex of baby Jesus, but these are the only two places erased.
For the rest, there is wear, highlights with glue or pewter which were used to give relief and which are gone but the state of conservation and the quality of the paint are "
exceptional
", underlines Jean- Marc Vallet, engineer at the Center de Recherche Conservation Restauration du Patrimoine (CRCRP) in Marseille.
“
It's a place to discover, you can see all the scenes without too many gaps or loss of material.
"
Read also: Storm Alex: discover the extent of the damage seen from the sky
Near Nice, storm Alex caused irreparable damage to many houses and public buildings but "
no monument was washed away
", according to the Heritage Foundation which launched an exceptional subscription: "
The walls have held up but the 500 millimeters of rain seriously damaged the roofs of buildings already vulnerable by the weight of centuries.
"
In La Brigue, one of the few villages in France with Ligurian Baroque buildings, the town hall received calls "
from all over France to find out if the chapel was still standing
", pledge of a return from tourists if the road and the railway tracks manage to be repaired.
