On 19 May 963 Emperor Otto I granted Adalbert, count-bishop of Luni, the fief of the castle of Vezzano together with its fortifications and its court: it is the first document that names the village. The stronghold had appeared shortly before, around the tenth century, when a ring of dry-stone walls was raised on the summit of Vezzano Superiore around the castle and its tower. Of that nucleus only ruins are left today, on the ridge that divides the Gulf of La Spezia from the Magra valley.
What to see
The remains sit at the highest point of the upper village, one of the two hilltop settlements that make up Vezzano along with Vezzano Inferiore, linked by the ridge road along which modern building has stretched since the nineteenth century. Do not expect a restored castle: what survives is masonry, stretches of the enclosure, the footprint of a fortification that time has taken apart. The reason to climb is the position. From up here the gulf, the Magra plain and the mouth of the Vara valley are all in view at once, three of the four districts into which the La Spezia area is divided, and it becomes clear why in the early Middle Ages the village grew around a fortified post guarding the pass between sea and valley.
Whoever held the pass held the power. The Lords of Vezzano, the Domini de Vethano, were vassals of the bishop of Luni from the tenth to the thirteenth century, and from castle-keepers they turned into rulers with influence over the Lunigiana and eastern Liguria. On 13 May 1202 the concordat of Terrarossa settled the disputes between bishop Gualtiero II and the Malaspina marquises on one side and the nobles of Vezzano on the other. Then came Genoa: with the act of fealty of 1253 the Republic took the slice of the fief closest to the coast, and in 1276, buying the estates of count Nicolò Fieschi, it completed the annexation. From then on the castle mattered less and less.
Visiting
Vezzano Ligure station, on the Genoa-Rome and Parma-La Spezia lines, lies downhill from the old town; by car, leave the A15 between Santo Stefano di Magra and La Spezia. The last stretch is uphill in any case, through the lanes of the village. There is no laid-out trail and no museum: what survives is looked at from the outside, and it works as a pretext for the view. Around the ruins the upper village is worth half an hour: the parish church of Nostra Signora del Soccorso, eighteenth century, the deconsecrated oratory of San Michele Arcangelo, and what is left of the twelfth-century church of San Siro, partly pulled down in 1880 to let the road through.
Our editors' tip
We walk it downhill: from Superiore to Inferiore along the old ridge road, the same one the people of Vezzano have used for centuries. Halfway down stands the Ospitale di San Nicola, a shelter for travellers and the sick already in operation in the fourteenth century, with a marble slab dated 1705 on its front. You end up beneath the pentagonal tower of Vezzano Inferiore, still standing and in good shape: seeing it after the ruins above is the quickest way to grasp what was lost up there.