Savona

• 1. Introduction

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  Every afternoon at 18:00 in Piazza Goffredo Mameli, Savona pauses. Twenty-one bells toll from the War Memorial built by sculptor Luigi Venzano, inaugurated on the 18th of September 1927. One toll for each letter of the Italian alphabet. Traffic stops, and pedestrians hold still as a sign of respect.

  Savona is a seaport on Italy's northwest coast, forty kilometers west of Genoa, where the Ligurian Alps drop down to the Ligurian Sea. Its population of 58,690 lives within compact streets carrying two thousand years of layered history. What drew navigators, popes, prisoners, and presidents to this stretch of Ligurian shoreline, and what shaped the city that still stops every day to count its dead?

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• 2. Conquered and Reconquered

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  Around 180 BC, the city came under Roman influence after the Punic Wars, in which Savona had been allied with Carthage. The price of backing the losing side was gradual absorption into Rome's expanding world. That peace would not hold forever.

  In 641 AD, Lombard forces attacked and destroyed the city. Short periods under Ostrogoth and then Byzantine control followed, before Savona recovered as a county seat in the Carolingian Empire. By the 10th century, the city's bishops held the rank of counts. The countship passed to the Marquesses of Montferrat in 981, and to a further set of Marquesses in 1084.

  After a long struggle with the Saracens, Savona won its independence in the 11th century. The city became a free commune aligned with the Holy Roman Emperor, similar in status to a free imperial city. The freedom declaration was signed in 1191 in the tower now known as the Torre del Brandale, also called the Campanassa. For the following three centuries, Dominican and Franciscan monasteries made Savona a center of religious culture.

  The Republic of Genoa proved Savona's most consequential rival. After prolonged conflict, Savona fell definitively in 1528. The victors demolished the upper town and buried the harbor, erasing the port that had sustained the city for generations. Savona then shared Genoa's fortunes until Napoleon reshuffled European borders at the century's turn.

  On the ruins of the old cathedral, the Genoese erected the Priamar Fortress in 1542. Built as a statement of dominance, it would later serve very different purposes.

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• 3. The Papal Family

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  The Cappella Sistina in Savona was built between 1480 and 1483 to house the mausoleum of a pope's parents. The construction was commissioned by Giovanni D'Aria and his brother Michele. The chapel's architecture echoes the chapel of Cardinal Pietro Riario in Rome's Basilica of the Santi Apostoli.

  Pope Sixtus IV was born in Pecorile in 1414 and died in 1484. His parents, Leonardo Della Rovere and Luchina Monleone, rest inside the chapel he commissioned in their memory. Giulio della Rovere, another member of the same family, was born in Albisola in 1443 and became Pope Julius II. He died in 1513.

  Before his election to the papacy, Giulio della Rovere commissioned the Palazzo Della Rovere in Savona. He engaged the architect Giuliano da Sangallo to design the building for use as a university.

  Pietro Riario, born in 1447, served as a cardinal and papal diplomat before his death in 1474. His kinsman Girolamo Riario, born in 1443, accumulated power as lord of Imola and Forlì. In 1478, Girolamo took part in the Pazzi Conspiracy, a plot to assassinate the Medici family in Florence. He died in 1488.

  By 1765, the Savona Sistine Chapel had fallen into serious decay. A reconstruction carried out between 1765 and 1767, at the direction of Genovese Doge Francesco Maria Della Rovere, gave the interior a Rococo character. The ceiling was painted by Paolo Gerolamo Brusco. The Cathedral of the Assumption next door, built to replace what the Genoese had demolished, still holds the relics of Saint Valentine.

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• 4. A Cottage in the Hills

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  In the hills above Savona stands a cottage long associated with Christopher Columbus, set among vegetable crops and fruit trees. Born around 1450, he spent much of his youth in the city. His father, Domenico Colombo, held documented property in the neighborhood, and the family lived there for many years. Columbus farmed that hillside land while chronicling his journeys.

  Savona is one of several places in Liguria traditionally associated with Columbus. A house documented as the property of Domenico Colombo remains in the Savona neighborhood, a physical link to the family's years there.

  Leon Pancaldo was born in 1488 or 1490 and became an explorer in his own right. He died in 1538, roughly thirty years after Columbus died in 1506. In Savona, a tower built in the 14th century bears his name: the Torre Leon Pancaldo, also called the Torretta, which stands as the symbol of the city.

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• 5. Prisoners and Patriots

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  Between April and mid-May of 1800, Austrian forces besieged Savona while a British naval squadron maintained a blockade at sea. The fortress surrendered on the 15th of May. Fifteen years later, in 1815, Savona was annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.

  In 1809, Savona received Pope Pius VII as a prisoner of Napoleon Bonaparte. The pontiff remained in the city for several years, held far from Rome.

  In 1830, Giuseppe Mazzini was imprisoned in the Priamar Fortress. Within those walls, between 1830 and 1831, he conceived what he called "Giovine Italia." The Museum Centre of Priamar now occupies part of the fortress where both a pope and a revolutionary once served their captivity.

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• 6. Sons and Daughters

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  The poet Gabriello Chiabrera was born in Savona in 1552 and died in 1638. The astronomer Orazio Grassi followed a generation later, born in 1583 and dying in 1654.

  Paolo Boselli was born in Savona in 1838 and served as Prime Minister of Italy during the First World War. He died in 1932. Sandro Pertini, born in 1896, built a long career in public life and became President of the Italian Republic. He died in 1990.

  Renata Scotto was born in Savona in 1934 and became a celebrated opera singer. She died in 2023. The television presenter Fabio Fazio was born in 1964, and singer-songwriter Annalisa Scarrone, known professionally as Annalisa, was born in 1985.

  Rari Nantes Savona has competed in Serie A1, the top division of Italian water polo, without interruption since 1982. The team has won the national championship three times.

  Maria Christina of Naples and Sicily, born in 1779, died in Savona in 1849 as Queen of Sardinia. At Noli, a village near Savona, an underwater farming project called Nemo's Garden cultivates plants beneath the sea. It was created to confront climate change, pollution, and hunger.

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