The village of Varese Ligure is an ellipse, and the castle closes it off to the north. The Fieschi counts built it in the Middle Ages to complete a piece of town planning designed on the drawing board: identical stone houses set along the perimeter, porticoes at ground level for workshops and trade, narrow alleys linking the ring to the central street. The result, known locally as the “Borgo Rotondo”, is a village and a defensive curtain at the same time. There were two very practical reasons for it: control of the communication and trade route between the eastern Ligurian coast and the Ligurian-Emilian Apennines, and the wars that kept crossing the upper Val di Vara.
What to see
The two towers speak of two different periods. The taller one is the Piccinino tower, of 1435: it takes its name from the condottiere Niccolò Piccinino, in the service of the duke of Milan Filippo Maria Visconti, who got the better of the Fieschi after two attempts at a siege had failed earlier in the fifteenth century. It was an offensive tower, originally fitted with a drawbridge and reckoned among the most advanced of its day in terms of weaponry; the men who built it came from the Lunigiana, the same workforce that had already worked on the tower of the Piagnaro castle at Pontremoli.
The second tower is lower, cylindrical, with a scarped base, and was built under the Landi between 1472 and 1478. The large windows you see today are not medieval: they arrived when the building changed job. In 1547, after the failure of Gianluigi Fieschi's conspiracy against Andrea Doria, the fief passed to the Republic of Genoa; once the podesteria was set up, the former Fieschi residence became the seat of the local podestà and the prison, and the structure was altered accordingly, the keep probably being lowered.
Visiting
The castle stands in piazza Castello, inside the Borgo Rotondo, and belongs today to the municipality. Restored in the second half of the twentieth century by the Liguria monuments authority, it hosts exhibitions, conferences and public events: opening times follow the calendar of what is on rather than a fixed schedule, so it is worth asking at the town hall before heading up the Val di Vara. The exterior, in any case, can always be walked around, and it is half the visit.
Our editors' tip
We suggest walking the full ring of porticoes before looking at the castle: five minutes are enough to see that village and fortress are a single work, planned together. Then go back to the two towers and look at their bases: the cylindrical one widens towards the ground, scarped, because it had to absorb artillery; the other, some forty years older, was still thinking in terms of drawbridges and shooting from above.