The dungeons of this castle have a name of their own: the Grimaldina, after the two Grimaldi brothers of Monaco locked up here at the end of the fourteenth century. The town was once simply La Pietra, after the limestone crag that rises east of the old centre and on which the Romans set a castrum. Enlarged during the barbarian and Saracen raids between the sixth and ninth centuries, that natural barrier probably marked the frontier between Byzantines and Lombards; the Byzantine castrum was destroyed perhaps by king Rothari, and on the same spot the medieval castle went up in the twelfth century.
What to see
The masonry sits straight on the rock, with nothing in between: that, more than its size, explains why the place counted in the local defensive system. What survives are the vaulted passages, the low rooms of the dungeons and, from the enlargement of 1550, the wing towards the south-west, an arch on the east side and two sentry boxes. The upper esplanade was armed with two heavy cannon against Saracen raiding; at the end of the eighteenth century, with the French about to arrive, the guns were sent back to Genoa.
The castle belonged for a long time to the bishops of Albenga, who held off the Del Carretto of Finale from here and who handed it to the Arnaldo family at the end of the fourteenth century; other patrician families followed. The village below it, to the west, had towered walls and five gates: the marina gate defended by a bastion to the south, the Santa Caterina gate to the north beside the country oratory, the portino gate under the tower of via Rocca Crovara, the royal gate to the west and the slaughterhouse gate to the east. In 1385 pope Urban VI ceded the village to Genoa, which made it the Republic's forward point between the Finale district and Loano, a fief of the Doria.
Visiting
You go up on foot from the old centre: a few minutes of ramps and stairways, but steep ones, and decent shoes help. The medieval part was restored in the nineteen-sixties and in May 1967 became a meeting place, so what you visit is both a castle and somewhere that opens in the evening; check first how it is being run at the moment.
Our editors' tip
Take the long way round, from below: follow the lane that passes under the cliff and look at the castle from there, where the limestone carries on into the masonry with no clear break. Then go up and lean out from the cannon esplanade: the coast opens from Loano to the Finale district, and that is exactly the field of view the castle was built and rebuilt for over the centuries.