This building has practised four trades: fortress, noble palace, spa establishment and hotel. The thread that holds them together is water. Inside the walls there is a spring, and a fortress with its spring at home is a fortress that can withstand a siege; three centuries later the same water became a cure to sell to clients.
What to see
Its origin is probably between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but no document gives the exact year. In the fifteen-sixties count Ettore Fieschi promoted the works that raised a late medieval fortress to the rank of a comital palace: the building is massive and its front still has two turrets at the corners.
The Fieschi, the most powerful family of the Genoese hinterland, lived here until 1856, when the last descendant, Carlotta, leased it to become a hydrotherapy establishment. In 1997, after a respectful restoration, it reopened as a grand hotel and period residence, and since 2017 it has housed a rehabilitation health facility.
Visiting
The palace is in piazza Italo Ghelfi, in the centre of Savignone, in the Scrivia valley; the building and its garden are protected by the heritage authority, but its present use is medical, so it cannot be visited: you look at it from outside, from the square. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the two turrets at the corners of the front. They are guard posts, that is fortress equipment, and a count who turns a stronghold into a residence could perfectly well take them off. He did not: they served to remind passers-by that this family, before it was elegant, had been armed.