On 5 October 1244 Pope Innocent IV, on his way to the Council of Lyon, slept here. Much of his retinue had to carry on to Varazze to find lodging, which says more than any measurement about the size of Stella castle: a garrison of about ten men was the norm. Its origins are uncertain — the documented rebuilding belongs to the first half of the twelfth century, though objects found on the site have suggested a Byzantine outpost as early as the sixth — and the place was finally abandoned in the second half of the fifteenth century.
What to see
Little survives, and you have to look for it. The largest piece is a square-based tower with a cylindrical tower grafted onto it, together with shreds of the inner curtain wall, which seems to have been pentagonal; inside the perimeter you can make out the foundations of at least two rectangular buildings. Most of what stands dates from the rebuilding that followed the destructions of 1272 and 1310, when Savona and Genoa took the hill in turn.
The two outer rings have been absorbed by the village: traces may survive in the retaining walls of the cemetery and of the small square in front of the old oratory of San Sebastiano, once the parish church and perhaps originally the castellans' chapel. On the north side, behind the cemetery, a tunnel runs a few metres under the walls of the inner core; local tradition makes it part of a passage towards the Mezzano tower, which watched the Riobasco valley and the mule track from Albisola from the opposite slope.
Visiting
The hill rises just above the old centre of San Giovanni, the main hamlet of Stella, and you walk up from the village along the cemetery road: the wall beside it was probably a far taller defensive wall linking the fortress to the houses. There is no ticket office and no laid-out trail, and no serious excavation has ever been carried out here; in the nineteen-fifties the summit was taken over by two aqueduct tanks, partly cut, it seems, into underground rooms of the castle. Wear closed shoes and take care among the ruins.
Our editors' tip
Climb up thinking about geography rather than stones: the knoll straddles the Riobasco and Sansobbia valleys, and the castle worked as a single system with the castellaro of Albisola Superiore. From the top you understand why the surrender of the castellan Sigismondo Pedebove, known as Simone della Stella, on 28 April 1227 brought Albisola down with it, and why Stella drifted into Genoa's orbit from then on. For the detail, the fullest account is Riccardo Musso's Storia di Stella, published in 2004.