On the rocky point that closes the bay of Paraggi to the east stands a square block of stone, with four corner turrets carried on corbels. It is not a villa dressed up as a castle: it went up as a watchpost over the Tigullio coast in the days of the Republic of Genoa, and some sources give 1626 as the year its construction was decided. Between 1812 and 1814, under the First French Empire, Napoleon's troops were quartered here.
What to see
The shape is a compact, almost cubic body that from the water looks as though it grew out of the rock. The four corbelled corner turrets are what you recognise from any angle; on the south-east front a large loggia opens, the one place where the mass of stone lightens. All around runs a Guelph battlement, with square-topped merlons. The building went through repeated works over the centuries, and what stands today is the result of them.
Once its military job was over the castle became a private house, and after its owners it is also known as Villa Bonomi Bolchini. In the 1990s the Bonomi Bolchini family rented it to Silvio Berlusconi: since then the building turns up in the papers more for its tenants than for its architecture.
Visiting
The castle is private property and cannot be visited: you look at it from outside, which is how it was meant to be seen anyway. It sits along the provincial road 227 between Santa Margherita Ligure and Portofino, on the stretch that curves around the bay; just past the beach of Paraggi, heading for Portofino, there is the spot where the bulk and the turrets stand out against the water. Mind the traffic: the road is narrow and the pavement comes and goes.
Our editors' tip
We prefer to look at it from the water: from the passenger ferry to Portofino, or simply swimming off the little beach of Paraggi, you see the castle as the people it was watching saw it, from the sea. If you stay on land, try the late afternoon, when the low western light peels the turrets away from the background.