A marble slab set above the doorway dated the work to the year of salvation 1606, for an estimated outlay of 56,000 Genoese lire. The Scola Tower, dedicated to St John the Baptist, stands on an isolated rock just beyond Punta Scola, the north-eastern tip of Palmaria, and belonged to the chain of coastal towers that the Senate of the Republic of Genoa had built through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to protect the shoreline, its towns and its villages. On 23 January 1800, during the War of the Second Coalition, the tower found itself in the middle of a naval clash between the British and French fleets: British gunfire tore open the curtain wall on one side, and in the first half of the nineteenth century it was abandoned for good.
What to see
The plan is pentagonal and rests straight on the rock; the walls are about four metres thick on average and the inner face is stiffened by tall buttresses. The garrison numbered eight people, six soldiers, a captain and a master bombardier, with ten cannon able to rake the stretch of sea between the bay of Palmaria, the Baia dell'Olivo at Porto Venere and the inlet of Lerici. Together with the later forts Cavour and Umberto I and the Batteria del Semaforo, the tower completed the island's defences.
A survey of 1773 records how it looked at the time: from the rocks you climbed a steep flight of steps, still in place, up to a portal carved with the arms of Genoa that has since been destroyed, and at the five corners of the wall-walk stood five lookout turrets. The same document notes two marble slabs, the one of 1606 and a second of 1608 set inside, naming the men who ran the works for the Genoese governor, Geronimo Asereto and Giulio Rapallo. In 1915 the Regia Marina had scheduled the building for demolition: it was stopped by a formal objection from Ubaldo Mazzini, inspector of monuments, to the Ministry of Public Education, and the tower was turned into a signal light. The perimeter walls were restored and consolidated between 1976 and 1980.
Visiting
There is no going inside: the rock has no landing place and the building remains a consolidated ruin. You look at the tower from the water, in the channel that separates Porto Venere from Palmaria, and the boats leaving the Porto Venere quay for the islands pass close by. From land it reads well from the point of Porto Venere, below the church of San Pietro, and from the Palmaria paths that drop towards Punta Scola.
Our editors' tip
We suggest late afternoon, when the light comes in from the west and lifts the stone pentagon clear of the island's dark backdrop. If you take the boat, sit on the side facing the mainland, because the passage is over quickly. And it is worth looking for the stairway cut into the rock: it is the only piece of the seventeenth-century approach that has come down to us.