The best thing here is an octagonal baptistery from the first half of the sixth century, brought back to light in 1937 by Nino Lamboglia's excavations and almost wholly intact. The place is Capo Don, on the shore of Riva Ligure, where the via Julia Augusta — the line the Aurelia still follows — ran past the mouth of the Argentina torrent, the ancient Tabia fluvius. This was Costa Balenae: the Antonine Itinerary lists it as a landing place, the Tabula Peutingeriana draws it as a mansio and spells it Costa Bellene. It was founded shortly after 181 BC, the year consul Paulus Aemilius defeated the Ligurians.
What to see
The baptistery can still be read in full, an eight-sided plan close kin to those of Albium Ingaunum and Forum Julii, the two Roman towns that had adopted the same scheme. Beside it run the walls of the so-called basilica of Capo Don, raised most likely at the wish of the bishop of Albenga, whose jurisdiction covered this stretch of coast. Further along lie the partly excavated remains of a Roman villa, which the campaigns of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology assign to the second or first century BC, the settlement's first phase.
The other half of the site is graves. The burial ground is large and the inhumations come in several types, the mark of an organised place lived in without a break: the buildings were reworked and gradually made smaller down to the tenth century, perhaps the twelfth. Coins and medals picked up here span the whole life of the empire. On the rise behind, the Grangia, a Benedictine monastery answering to Genoa is recorded until the fourteenth century.
Visiting
The Capo Don archaeological area, the name you will read on the signs, opens a few metres from the Aurelia, in the district of Riva Ligure. Digging is still going on and access follows the research seasons, so it is worth asking at the town hall before you climb up. The easiest approach is the Ponente Ligure cycle path, laid on the bed of the old coastal railway, which passes right below the site.
Our editors' tip
Bring the Tabula Peutingeriana with you, even on a phone screen: seeing the mansio symbol drawn on a Roman map and then standing on the ground where the horses were changed alters the way you read these low walls. And keep an eye on the relationship between the site and the sea. The station lived as long as the road and its small landing were useful to someone, and it ended when the traffic shifted and raids by the Muslims based at Frassineto made the coast unsafe.