Walls of Genoa

Genoa has more and longer walls than any other city in Italy, the remains of the seven successive defensive circuits the city gave itself over its history, each borrowing where it was practical from what stood before, more than once taking in stretches of the civic aqueduct. The beginnings of the place are datable between the seventh and the fifth centuries BC, when a small fortified settlement held the summit of the hill now called Castello, a name that may go back to the Ligurian castellum, or castellaro, a refuge for the surrounding population. Colonies settled on a coast well placed above its landing places, mainly of Etruscans, whose customs and techniques the people already there took up. Wall remains datable to the fifth century BC suggest a circuit running from the ground around the convent of Santa Maria di Castello to the church of San Silvestro.

In 205 BC the city, bound to Rome as a foedus aequum, was destroyed by the general Mago Barca, brother of Hannibal, and the proconsul Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus ordered it rebuilt at once. Whether the Roman Genua that followed was walled is argued two ways: by one reckoning it is probable, if not certain, that a circuit climbed to the present Porta Soprana and went round the Sarzano hill, whose name is thought to come from Arx Iani; by another, no archaeological or documentary evidence for a wall of that period has been found. What the ground does show is depth. Under Santa Maria delle Grazie la Nuova, where the Paganini auditorium was made in the 1990s, the excavation cut a dense and complete stratification, from a pre-Roman wall of dry stones set against a large boulder up through Roman, Byzantine, Lombard, medieval and Renaissance work.

For the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the ninth or tenth century no defensive circuit is attested, though the strategic weight of the post makes one likely. The first known walls belong to the ninth century, and their occasion is told two ways: by one account the city gained wide autonomy under Berengar II of Italy, with economic growth and a rising population behind the building; by another the work falls between 848 and 889 and was helped by Carolingian money, a dating Ennio Poleggi argued for against the later, tenth-century one. The circuit carried four gates and four towers and took in about twenty hectares, with roughly twenty-two hectares of inhabited ground between the wall and the shoreline. Two areas were deliberately left outside. One was the summit of the Sant'Andrea hill, the city's burial ground since pre-Roman times, whose ancient tombs came to light when the hill was levelled between 1900 and 1904 and are now reassembled in the Museo di archeologia ligure at Pegli. The other was the Borgo around San Siro, Genoa's cathedral before San Lorenzo was chosen in the tenth century, and with it the small settlements of workmen and artisans that had grown up around churches, monasteries and feudal palaces.

In 1155 the line was pushed north-west to enclose the Borgo, the third of the city's three territorial bodies, castrum, civitas and burgus, and the one left outside both the Roman and the early medieval circuits. The new wall began at the church of Santa Croce near Sarzano and left the seaward slope of the Sarzano hill alone, the sheer drop to the water asking for no further fortification. From Porta Soprana it ran about 2.4 kilometres and held 55 hectares, a great deal more than the circuit it replaced, and the civic aqueduct was carried along the whole of its course. Building went on for years, until by 1163 the international situation, and above all the Republic's relations with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, had forced an acceleration that Caffaro recorded: fifty-three days of effort by the whole population finished what was still unbuilt.

The three principal gates were monumental, with high semicircular flanking towers. Two survive, Porta Soprana, also called the gate of Sant'Andrea, and Porta dei Vacca; the third, the Porta Aurea, which gave the quarter of Portoria its name, had its towers cut down in the eighteenth century and was demolished outright in the second half of the twentieth when the quarter was rebuilt. In 1287 the peninsula of the mole was fortified at the southern limit of the port arc, completing the defences on the seaward side of the city. From there the wall ran back to the older circuit as the Mura di Malapaga, named from the Casone della Malapaga beside it, a building put up in 1269 and used as a prison for men who had run up debts they could not pay, and from the middle of the nineteenth century as a barracks of the Guardia di Finanza.

The fourteenth-century enlargement was driven by trade and by fear. Factional violence among the city's families had put Genoa itself in danger, and Castruccio Castracani, lord of Lucca and at war with the Republic, was threatening an assault, having already taken Chiavari and Rapallo. Between 1320 and 1327 the eastern side was carried out to the hill of Carignano, across ground now occupied by the Acquasola esplanade and the Monumental Bridge, with two gates, the Porta dell'Acquasola and the Porta degli Archi. Between 1347 and 1350 a second phase ran west from the fortress of Castelletto to the new Porta di San Tommaso near the present Principe station, with a series of towers and gates that have all gone. The circuit now measured 4,550 metres and held 155 hectares. It was this city that Francesco Petrarch saw, and in the Itinerarium breve de Ianua ad Ierusalem of 1358 he left it a legacy of a word: the town everyone had until then called La Dominante would from that point be known as la Superba.

The years between the raising of the fourteenth-century walls and 1528 brought wars and devastating epidemics, and what the Genoese wanted afterwards was not a wider circuit but a safer one. The old walls had decayed, had in places been built against, and could no longer hold against the scientific siege whose theory was then being laid down. The turn came with Andrea Doria, who in 1528 placed the Republic of Genoa under the protection of the Spaniards and, fearing fresh attacks by the French army, promoted the modernisation of the city walls. The design went to the Milanese engineer Giovanni Maria Olgiati, and the Magistracy of the Walls was instituted in 1536 to see the task through. Square towers gave way to triangular bastions and new curtains were built with a counterscarp profile, the work beginning at Carignano and on the hill sections of the city. The rebuilding of the Lanterna in 1543 may also be his, and from 1546 he was designing the walls of Milan for Ferrante Gonzaga.

The circuit was then extended along the whole sea front, closing the seaward side of the port itself with new stretches between Porta San Tommaso and the Molo Vecchio, with a gate for each pier of the harbour. At the end of the Molo Vecchio, in the second half of the century, Galeazzo Alessi designed the Porta del Molo, also called Porta Siberia, and its execution was entrusted to Antonio Roderio da Carona. Of the three principal gates of the sixteenth-century walls the Porta Siberia and the Porta degli Archi still stand, the latter moved from its first position for the opening of via XX Settembre and carrying above its arch a statue of Santo Stefano by the sculptor Taddeo Carlone, while the Porta di San Tommaso was demolished to build the Principe railway station.

Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy had threatened invasion repeatedly, and Louis XIII of France with him, when on 10 May 1625 a French and Piedmontese force attacked and failed: the Savoyard army could not break the stubborn resistance of the men of the Polcevera valley at the Pertuso pass, where the shrine of Nostra Signora della Vittoria was later raised in memory of the day. A new circuit had been proposed as long before as 1568; a year after the failed attack the government of the Republic gave the work its blessing, and the first stone was laid on 7 December 1626. Money was the difficulty, and laws written for the purpose reached across the whole of civil society: the leading men of the city were promised a statue in the Palazzo Ducale if they gave generously, while the artisans and countrymen of the capital, the valleys and the two rivieras were required to furnish means, labour or materials in fixed quantities.

The design was the work of the mathematicians Vincenzo Maculano and Giovanni Battista Baliani, a friend of Galileo Galilei, with supervision entrusted to Ansaldo De Mari and the Lombard architect Bartolomeo Bianco. The raising of curtains and bastions along the two ridges above the Polcevera and the Bisagno fell in the early 1630s, dated to the four years between 1629 and 1633 by one account and to two years from 1630 by another, and the workforce of diggers, bricklayers and stonemasons, divided into twenty-eight teams, is given as eight hundred men by some accounts and as three thousand by others, while another reckoning puts it at eight thousand. The cost ran to something near ten million Genoese lire. When it was finished the circuit measured 19,560 metres, of which about seven kilometres followed the coastline, and enclosed 903 hectares, nearly five times the 197 hectares held by the old walls; the quarter of San Teodoro was brought inside the city by it.

Mount Peralto was identified as the key point of the whole defensive system, and Fort Sperone was raised on its summit; the small forts already standing, Castellaccio, Sperone, Begato and Tenaglia, were linked and enclosed by the new bastions. Building on such steep and thinly settled ground is the reason so much of this circuit survives, while the stretches nearest the city later gave way to new quarters and infrastructure. On the seaward side the walls were reinforced with new bastions and carried beyond the Porta di San Tommaso to Capo di Faro, taking in the Villa del Principe, which had stood outside the fortified enclosure; the Doria family protested, and the wall went up in front of their palace regardless. Close to the lighthouse stood the monumental Lantern Gate, designed by Antonio Ponsonelli and built in 1633.

Through the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, fortifications went up along the perimeter of the walls and beyond it. Immediately after the Austrian siege of 1747 four fortresses were built outside the circuit, Diamante, Quezzi, Richelieu and Santa Tecla, designed by the French military engineers Jacques De Sicre and Pierre De Cotte. During the siege of Genoa of April 1800 these forts were the scene of many harsh battles between French and Austrian armies. The Congress of Vienna annexed the Napoleonic Ligurian Republic to the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1814, and between 1815 and 1840 the Savoy government built a further series of forts, towers and coastal batteries to the designs of major Giulio D'Andreis, work that left Genoa the best equipped fortress in the Mediterranean. In 1820 the Engineering Military Corps of the Kingdom of Sardinia began a set of towers outside the walls on the pattern of Martello towers, but cost and limited usefulness stopped the programme a few years later, with only three completed.

The Lantern Gate was demolished in 1830 once the Porta Nuova, a short distance away, had been built to carry the increased traffic, and the walls along the port came down in 1835 for the opening of the carrettiera Carlo Alberto, the present via Gramsci. The cutting of the Montesano hill for Brignole station destroyed the last hill stretch of the New Walls, and the city's expansion eastward in the closing decades of the century removed the Fronti Basse, a single vast rampart that ran straight across the plain on the right bank of the Bisagno and linked the New Walls to the sixteenth-century circuit; of its two gates the Porta Pila was moved behind Brignole station and the Porta Romana was demolished in 1891. Traces of the rampart were found in 1991 during the building of the underground car park in piazza della Vittoria. The San Benigno hill, whose church and monastery had already been pulled down in the nineteenth century for two large barracks, was cut away altogether in the 1930s, and the walls along its ridge went with it. Not everything was lost in those years: the houses built against Porta Soprana were cleared away from 1892 in restorations begun by the architect Alfredo d'Andrade and continued after his death until the southern tower was freed in 1935.

The new walls and the forts were struck off the military estate in 1914, the purposes they had been planned for gone. What followed was improvised: warehouses, prisons for prisoners of war in the First World War, anti-aircraft emplacements and lodgings for evacuees in the Second, while other structures passed into private hands or were left to decay. Most of the sixteen Genoese fortifications are still visible, and although they are public property their condition is not uniform, the principal fortresses restored and open to visitors on request, others walked into freely in a state of decay, some carrying television or telephone masts. One alone is still held by a military body: Fort San Giuliano, above Corso Italia in the Albaro quarter, which houses the provincial command of the Carabinieri. The New Walls and their forts are enclosed within the Parco Urbano delle Mura, the city park of the walls, 876 hectares that make the largest green space in Genoa and carry excursions of historical and wildlife interest. The walls themselves are protected as Italian national heritage.