You cannot see it from the Turchino road, and that is deliberate: Forte Geremia lies under a grassed earthwork that merges with the summit of the mountain. The military engineers of the Kingdom of Italy built it that way, towards the end of the nineteenth century, at 806 metres on the eastern fore-summit of Bric Geremia (819 metres), 7 km from the sea as the crow flies, where the Cerusa, the Leiro and the Stura valleys come together.
What to see
The fort is a two-storey stone barracks, still in fair structural condition despite being abandoned after the Second World War. At one end a caponier juts out, the post that watched the entrance, the yard in front and above all the access road. The magazine is not in the building but inside the mountain: it was cut into Monte Geremia and isolated by a ring cavity, and a tunnel-corridor still links it to the barracks. Studies suggest the place could hold more than a hundred men, with two 9 BR/Ret guns and six 12 BR/Ret guns trained on the Turchino valley and the heights above the Stura and the Vezzulla.
The fort did not work alone. A short way off stood the Aresci Battery, now half destroyed: the two works were ringed by a substantial ditch and joined by a military road and a telegraph line, which allowed quick movement and communication. On 28 January 1914 the battery's magazine exploded, killing several soldiers and damaging part of the structures; garrisoned until the First World War, the Aresci was then abandoned for want of military use. What can still be made out today is the guardhouse and the yard in front, with the gun positions and the barracks alongside.
Visiting
You reach it from the Faiallo provincial road, which runs right past; from provincial road 456 over the Turchino pass, by contrast, the fort stays invisible. Administratively this is the municipality of Masone, hard against the boundary with Genoa and Mele, which take the southern and eastern flanks of the Bric. Since restoration was completed in 2012 the building has served as a visitor centre and equipped stopping point for the Beigua regional nature park; since September 2016 an association has run it as a refuge, with dormitories, lunch and dinner and a calendar of events. Book ahead if you want a bed or a meal.
Our editors' tip
Do not stop at the yard: climb onto the earthwork. From up there, and from the fort's windows, the coast opens between Voltri and Crevari along with the eastern side of the Beigua massif — it is the only way to grasp what the place was watching. And if you want to see the fort whole from outside, look at it from Bric del Dente or Monte Giallo: the main front faces west-north-west and stands out sharply from there.