Along the wall-walk that juts out from the wall run swallow-tail merlons, the Ghibelline kind; on the rest of the circuit the merlons are square, Guelph. Levanto castle holds two opposing camps on the same stone, which is the quickest way to grasp how often it was rebuilt. A fortified building in this town is documented as early as 1165, when the territory answered to the Malaspina; a thirteenth-century document mentions a «castello di Monale». What stands today, however, dates from the second half of the sixteenth century, Genoese work, probably raised over the earlier medieval structure.
What to see
The plan is a quadrilateral: four curtain walls and a round tower. The wall-walk projects from the body of the building, carried on brick arches and sandstone corbels; the tower too is crowned with Ghibelline merlons, and its three windows are a later addition. On the south and east fronts, on two levels, open the gun ports cut during the sixteenth-century rebuilding: the castle is to all effects part of the town's old walls.
Decoration comes down to two slate bas-reliefs of the Genoese school, an Annunciation of the fifteenth century and a Saint George and the dragon of the sixteenth. As for what came later, when the Capitaneato of Levanto was set up in 1637 the building served for a time as the Captain's seat, and it was then used as a prison until 1797, the year the Republic of Genoa fell and the French arrived.
Visiting
The castle stands in the southern part of the old town, between salita San Giorgio and salita al Castello: you walk up through the carruggi, a few minutes uphill from the seafront. Sold off by the state in the second half of the nineteenth century and conservatively restored around the turn of the following century, it is privately owned and cannot be visited inside. What is left is the exterior, which reads very well from the lanes around it.
Our editors' tip
We suggest walking the whole perimeter rather than stopping at the first view: as you change side the merlons shift from swallow-tail to square, and the gun ports appear on their two levels. Late afternoon light suits the walls best. And it is worth knowing what they tell in the village: tunnels are said to run from the cellars down to the beach and to the church of the Santissima Annunziata.