Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The chapel Santa Maria de Cambia, dated from the last years of the 12th or 13th century, replaces a preroman building whose jobs remain in its campanile. Its Romanesque altar, unique in Corsica, adopts a dolmenic form (stazzona) typical of the south of the island, although disappeared in Castagniccia. The chapel is associated with a Christianized statue-menhir, the Stantara Santa Maria, decorated with an engraved cross and linked to local petrification legends. These elements suggest a cultural continuity since the Iron Age, reinforced by the proximity of the rock art site A Petra Frisgiata, the richest of Corsica with 595 engraved signs.

The chapel and the statue-menhir, although not individually classified, are inseparable from the religious and historical landscape of Corsuli, an ancient feudal village of the piève de Vallerustia. According to archaeologist Geneviève Moracchini-Mazel, Santa Maria and the nearby chapel San Chirgu (Saint Cyr) were built simultaneously by a father and his son in the 13th century. The two buildings, restored in 2008-2009, illustrate Corsican Romanesque architecture and its anchoring in pre-Christian traditions, as evidenced by the lunar cults attested in Cambia.

The site is part of a broader heritage complex, including the ruins of a medieval convent and the Corsuli L-oppidum, a vestige of a feudal castle transformed in 1358 during the a terra di u cumunu revolution. The chapel Santa Maria, classified as a historical monument for its whole, thus embodies the stratification of the epochs, from pagan beliefs to Christianization, through the feudal organization of Castagniccia. Its access, reported from the village of Corsoli, makes it a place of visit prized for its history and mystery.

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