The object that tells you most about Camogli is not a ship model: it is the original manuscripts of the statutes of the Mutua Assicurazione Marittima Camogliese, founded in 1853, the fund through which the village's shipowners insured one another's vessels. They are kept in the Gio Bono Ferrari maritime museum, assembled by the man whose name it carries: he founded it in 1937 and in 1938 gave the whole collection to the municipality of Camogli, which still owns it.
What to see
The cases span the period from Napoleonic rule — the Ligurian Republic and the First French Empire, from 1797 to 1815 — to the First World War: scale models of sailing ships and steamers, navigational instruments, pilot books, manuals of seamanship and a great many seaman's books, the personal record of every voyage signed on for. Among the old prints and paintings, the oldest shows a pinco of 1790, the cargo sailing vessel that worked this stretch of coast.
One section leaves the sea for Italian history: relics, letters and objects of the Risorgimento, some of them once belonging to Giuseppe Garibaldi and to the expedition of the Thousand. Most of the collection arrived as gifts from local families, and that is what gives the museum the tone of a community archive rather than a cabinet of curiosities: behind almost every object there is someone who lived a few streets away.
Visiting
The museum is on via Gio Bono Ferrari, close to the old centre, and since 1971 it has shared its building with the archaeological museum and the civic library. It is small and dense: an hour is enough, less if you only look at the models. Opening times are limited and change with the season, so it is worth checking them before you go.
Our editors' tip
Stop at the seaman's books: they are handwritten lists of ships, ports and dates, and reading two or three of them shows how far the men of a village this small once travelled. Then walk out to the mole with those names in your head: today's harbour is tiny and quiet, but the fleet described in those registers sailed from exactly there.