Before it was a castle, and before that a palace, it was a monastery: around the sixth century the bishop of Luni, Venanzio, founded here the community that gave the site its name, and elements of that complex are still recognisable on the first floor of the present building. The village of Ceparana, which grew up around the religious house, appears in the imperial diploma of Otto I of 963, where the document names the castro, the castle, probably raised in the tenth century on the site of the monastery of San Venanzio.
What to see
What stands today is the result of a very long chain of transformations: Benedictine abbey, then fortress, then noble residence. In the eleventh century the bishops of Luni, who owned the village, strengthened its defences. From 1717 the property passed to the Genoese family of the Giustiniani, who turned the whole thing into a lordly residence and left it the name it still goes by.
The most eloquent piece is the bell tower with its four mullioned windows, left almost intact after the restoration work of the early twentieth century: it is the most legible remnant of the abbey. The tower once held a large bell that people around here called the voice of Luni. Beside it stands the Giustiniani family chapel, built in the eighteenth century and dedicated to the Santissima Annunziata, with a marble altarpiece of the Annunciation.
Visiting
Ceparana is the largest and most populous hamlet of Bolano, on the plain where the Vara flows into the Magra, behind La Spezia and a step from the Tuscan border. An honest warning: the building is private property, today divided between homes and an inn, so it is not a museum and cannot be toured at will. From the outside, though, the tower and the body of the palace read perfectly well. Incidentally, the plain of Ceparana is where the Alta Via dei Monti Liguri ends, the 442 km route that starts at Ventimiglia.
Our editors' tip
We would walk around the building rather than head straight for the facade: it is by changing angle that the layering becomes clear, with the monastic tower rising above a structure that is now eighteenth-century. Then drive the few minutes up to old Bolano: the historic centre keeps its triangular medieval plan with its three gates, porta Castello, porta Stazon and porta Chilosi, and from up there the position above the meeting of the two rivers explains itself.