Castel Gavone, Finale Ligure site features

What stands is a blown-up castle made safe to walk in, with one tower nearly whole. The Torre dei Diamanti rises out of the ruins of everything else, and the lift inside it is the only mechanical thing on the site.

The tower is keeled and faced in diamond points. It terminates a triangular block added about 1490, and it is built in the shape of a ship's keel, covered in bugnato — rusticated blocks cut to a diamond point, which is where the name comes from. The triangular plan and the sloped faces are not decoration: they were meant to deflect round shot coming up the slope from the sea.

Around it, two circuits and a quarried-away hillside. An external rectangular circuit was begun in the second or third decade of the sixteenth century and finished in the last years of Del Carretto rule, before 1558; at the base of it are a traverse, a point and a covered way, added to stop enemy sappers approaching. On the north side the rock itself is missing: Gaspare Beretta had the spur cut away in 1674 so that attackers could not fortify it.

And a village that is not there. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century the castle's name was also the name of the settlement around it, a frazione of Perti — demolished to build the sixteenth-century walls.

The Torre dei Diamanti

The one thing to come for. Keeled like a ship, sheathed in diamond-point rustication, built about 1490 at the apex of a triangular block designed to face artillery from the seaward slope. A lift runs inside it to the summit and a wide view over the Finalese.

The unfinished outer circuit

Begun in the 1510s or 1520s and completed only in the last years of Del Carretto rule, before 1558 — the year Genoa invaded again. Its traverse, point and covered way were built to keep enemy engineers at a distance, and they are the clearest trace on the site of what the castle was for.

The missing spur on the north side

In 1674 the Spanish engineer Gaspare Beretta had a rocky spalto on the northern flank cut away, so that besiegers could not entrench on it. It is an absence rather than a structure, and once pointed out it is obvious.

Castel San Giovanni below

Built in 1643, far more recent than Castel Gavone, as an advanced defence of it — holding the slope beneath so that enemy guns could not be set up there — while simultaneously protecting and controlling Finalborgo. Both works are visible from each other.

The two names, both medieval

Gavone and Govone are both attested in fourteenth-century documents, and Govone appears to prevail until the end of Spanish rule, written castillo Govon. Gavone is the form of the last two centuries; the older one is coming back into use. The origin is uncertain and may record old links with Piedmont.

The castle on the stamps

The image of Castel Gavone appeared on some of the Serie castelli stamps issued by the Italian post office from the 1980s until 1998.