The Lercaro castle is not a castle built for war: around 1570 Francesco Lercaro, a Genoese patrician, had it raised as a country residence on one of his estates at Ovada, on a spot where fortified structures and a fourteenth-century watchtower already stood, the tower serving to collect tolls on the border between the Republic of Genoa and the Duchy of Milan.
What to see
From outside it is a massive block built on the scheme of the Genoese noble palaces, on a hill above the right bank of the Orba. Its mark is the square corner tower with projecting machicolation; the older tower, thought also to have watched a ford on the stream, was absorbed into the building and can no longer be read as a separate element. Minor towers survive at the corners of the palace, while the nineteenth-century entrance stair, the plastered fronts with hints of decoration and the great central hall belong to the vocabulary of the villa rather than that of the fortress.
Visiting
It has to be said at once: the castle cannot be visited. On the founder's death it passed to a cousin and then to the Franzoni family, and in 1872 the marchioness Bettina Franzoni Lercaro Nossardi gave it to the town of Ovada, asking that it become a hospice for the elderly and the infirm. A hospice it was for decades, until running costs closed it; by 2015 the building was unsafe and unusable, its facade badly damaged and much of the roof collapsed, and under a protection order from the heritage authority. Of the three floors, the vaulted hall and the fifty or so rooms, including the family chapel dedicated to the Christ Child, only the sheer size can now be guessed at, and from a distance.
Our editors' tip
The right place to look at it from is the valley floor of the Orba: from there you understand why the hill was strategic before it was scenic, and why a Genoese family wanted its country house exactly on the border that had been a toll post for centuries.