Work started around 1559 on another town's money: the revenue from a tax on the writing of documents, collected inland at Triora, was funnelled into the building site of Riva's tower. Until then the village — then called Riva di Taggia, and the sea outlet of nearby Taggia — had no defences of its own, partly because it kept paying its share towards the walls of the larger town. In 1546 Taggia gave up those contributions on one condition: the money had to fortify the coast.
What to see
The tower was built as a lookout post: an eye on the horizon, to identify approaching sails and raise the alarm before the boats reached the shore. Construction crawled, but a few years after the start it was finished and in service — a heavy fortress, out of all proportion to the size of the village that had wanted it.
The tally of the raids explains that disproportion. Between 1551 and 1562 Barbary corsairs landed five times on this stretch of coast: plunder, houses burned, inhabitants carried off. The result was a depopulated village and the abandonment of the harbour that in the fifteenth century, with its shipyards, had been Taggia's main landing place. The tower is what is left of those years of fear.
Visiting
Riva Ligure is crossed by the via Aurelia, which links it to Taggia on one side and Santo Stefano al Mare on the other; trains have not stopped here since 2001, when the Genoa-Ventimiglia line was moved inland. The Riviera cycle path now runs on the old track bed and passes a few metres from the tower. It is a short stop: the whole bulk of it reads from the street, and the old centre with the parish church of San Maurizio is a few minutes away on foot.
Our editors' tip
Come by bicycle, and do not stop only here. To the west, towards the mouth of the Argentina stream, the archaeological area of Capo Don has yielded the remains of a mid-sixth-century early Christian church with its baptistery, whose octagonal font resembles the one at Albenga. Tower and excavations tell two ways of living on this coast: first the landing place, then the fear of the sea.