Castel San Giovanni, Finale Ligure historical timeline

This fort is a fifteenth-century tower wearing a seventeenth-century fortress. The tower came first, on the slope between the Del Carretto castle above and the walled capital below; the Spanish, needing to keep artillery off that slope, built round and over it rather than clearing it, and left the octagon standing in the middle of their own work. Genoa part-demolished the result once the marquisate was its own, the Kingdom of Sardinia turned it into a prison, and the Italian state eventually took it over and restored it. What stands above Finalborgo today is the Spanish outline with the medieval core legible inside it.

Chronology

1. mid-1400s A torrione is raised on the slope above Finalborgo. It is recorded by the historian Gianmario Filelfo and known from a drawing of 1571, and it survives as the octagonal central body of the present fortress.
2. 1642 The Spanish begin the present fort, completing it in 1643, to strengthen the defences — designed by the Milanese ingegnere camerale Francesco Prestino and built on the ruins of the older tower. The outline a visitor walks today is this campaign's.
3. 1674 The Spanish restore and enlarge the fort in its sectors, working to 1678 under the engineer Gaspare Beretta, who builds the direct connection with the borgo and reinforces the fortifications. That link is still what ties the fort to Finalborgo.
4. 1707 The fort is abandoned, in the year Spanish rule over Finale officially ended. It had been a Spanish work for sixty-five years and was never again garrisoned by the power that built it.
5. 1713 Austria cedes the fort to Genoa, which part-demolishes it. Genoa did the same to Castel Gavone above, in 1715 — the hill was disarmed deliberately, not abandoned to decay.
6. 1822 The fort becomes a penitentiary. It is the longest single use in its history, and the reason the interior was repeatedly altered after its military life ended.
7. 1960 The fort is taken into the state demesne, and has been entirely restored in recent years. The restoration is what makes the octagonal core readable again.
8. 2014 From December the Ministero della cultura manages the fort through the Polo museale della Liguria, which in December 2019 becomes the Direzione Regionale Musei Liguria. That office, and not the comune, is who a visitor has to ask.

What survived the demolition and the prison

Two things in this fort's history could have erased the fifteenth-century tower and neither did. Genoa's part-demolition after 1713 took sectors of the Spanish work rather than the core; the conversion to a penitentiary in 1822 needed cells and walls, which an octagonal masonry tower supplies rather than obstructs. The result is unusual: a fort whose oldest element is also its most central and most intact. The recent restoration, under state ownership since 1960, is what made it legible — and the church inside the complex, with its campanile, survived all of it too. The question of exactly when the Spanish fort was built has been studied in its own right: the standard monograph on the building, published at Finale Ligure in 2018, is subtitled Progettisti, costruttori, epoca di edificazione — designers, builders, date of construction.

• Wikipedia