How Was Finalborgo Built

Finalborgo is a planned foundation rather than an organic growth, and it shows. The streets run in a rough grid between two squares, the whole enclosed by a wall with towers, and three of the original gates survive — Porta Reale, Porta Testa and Porta Mediana.

The building material throughout is the local limestone, with slate for frames and lintels. The combination of pale stone and dark slate around doors and windows is the characteristic Ligurian detail, and Finalborgo has a concentration of carved portals that is unusual for a town this small.

The basilica of San Biagio keeps the most striking single element: an octagonal Gothic bell tower from the fourteenth century, left standing when the church itself was rebuilt in the seventeenth. The mismatch between the two is visible and is the town’s most photographed thing.

The Santa Caterina complex is a fourteenth-century Dominican convent with two cloisters, suppressed under Napoleon and used as a prison for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before restoration turned it into the museum and a cultural venue.