In 1799 it was not a foreign army that finished off the castle of Torriglia, but the villagers themselves, who climbed up and stormed it while the Napoleonic upheaval was sweeping away the imperial fiefs. Of the centuries before, an uncertain birth date remains: local sources speak of the year 1000 or shortly after, but the first firm document is a bull issued by Pope Anastasius IV in 1153. In 1180 the castle passed to the Malaspina family, who held it until 1250 with the approval of Emperor Frederick II of Swabia; in the second half of the 13th century it went to the Fieschi, counts of Lavagna. It withstood the siege laid by Raffaele Adorno in 1392, fell in 1450 to the Milanese troops of Filippo Maria Visconti, and two years later was back in Fieschi hands, which kept control until 1547. After the conspiracy of that year the fief passed to the Doria, who turned it into a marquisate and then an independent principality, and radically altered the building.
What to see
The most eloquent piece is the tower at the northern end of the complex: square, 19 m high, crowned with Guelph merlons, in forms that scholars ascribe to the Fieschi remodelling. Seen from below it shows two different building campaigns: at the bottom, large identical hammered stones that some historians date to a very early period, perhaps Roman; above them, kiln-fired bricks capped by irregular stones. Inside the tower were rooms used to hold and torture prisoners, as documents recording numerous escape attempts confirm.
Of the rest of the castle it is mainly the plan that can still be read. It was rectangular, possibly ringed by a moat, laid out on two or more floors, with a parlour, a great hall, bedchambers, storerooms and an armoury; the round bastion facing east held a chapel and the archive room. Two lanes climbed from the village and met at the top near the so-called torretta, a quadrangular structure with a pointed roof; from there the path went on to the Prince's garden, today a park.
Visiting
The castle has been open to the public again since 2009, after restoration work funded by the Italian ministry for cultural heritage and by the Liguria Region. You reach it on foot from the village, walking up via al Castello towards the Colomba district. What waits at the top is a consolidated ruin, not a furnished manor: walls, the base of the tower, the outline of the layout and the village lying far below.
Our editors' tip
It is worth spending a few minutes at the foot of the tower: the break between hammered stone and brick tells the cycles of destruction and rebuilding better than any information panel, and those cycles are why the founding date is still unsettled. And we like to point out what the stones do not say: during the Second World War these ruins had one last use, as a shelter and observation post for partisan bands.