Noli discovery guide

Because a republic of four square kilometres lasted six hundred years and built warships.

The Republic of Noli ran from 7 August 1192 to 2 December 1797. It was governed by a Podestà and a Consiglio dei Consoli e dei Capi di casa, it won its own diocese, and its recorded exports were spices, salt and glass — its production, glass and warships. In the thirteenth century it closed itself inside a wall and over seventy towers.

The friction is that it reads as a beach first. Noli is a Bandiera blu resort with sand and a promenade, and the republic is easy to walk straight past; nothing here publishes an opening hour, not the castle and not the churches.

The smart way is to read the town as a state. The Palazzo del Comune was the seat of its consuls; under the adjoining loggia, plaques record Dante, Columbus on 31 May 1476 and Giordano Bruno in 1576. Then walk out of the walls to San Paragorio, the first cathedral, and up to the castle.

April to June. The best of the year here. The sea is warming, the headland paths up to Capo Noli are comfortable, and the borgo is not yet full.

July. The second Sunday is the feast of Sant'Eugenio, the patron. Beach season proper begins, and the Bandiera blu sand fills.

August. Peak, and the one month to avoid if the republic rather than the beach is why you are coming.

September and October. The other good window. Warm sea, thinner crowds, and the olive and wine country inland at work; the Lumassina vineyards lie in the valleys towards Finale Ligure.

November to March. Quiet, and mild by Italian standards — the ridge between Monte Settepani and Pian dei Corsi, mostly between 1,000 and 1,400 metres, blocks the cold air that sits over the Po plain in winter. Much will be shut.

Start under the portico, because that is the old waterfront

The historic centre presents a porticoed front — today on the Aurelia, once directly on the beach. The record compares it to Sottoripa in Genoa: the same arrangement, the same purpose, the centre of a seafaring borgo.

Then the seat of the republic

Attached to the portico is the medieval Palazzo del Comune with its civic tower, seat of the consuls and of the government of the Republic of Noli. On the facade toward the sea promenade are a restored sundial and four ogival polifore, partly blind and partly restored; inside, the seventeenth-century Sala del Consiglio keeps fragments of late-medieval fresco cycles brought from the porta di San Giovanni.

Read the plaques under the loggia

Beside the palazzo is the Loggia della Repubblica Nolese, of the same period, with a column whose bugnato capital is typical of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Plaques beneath it record the passage of Dante Alighieri, who cites Noli in the Purgatorio; Cristoforo Colombo on 31 May 1476, leaving for Portugal; and Giordano Bruno in 1576.

Count what is left of seventy towers

In the thirteenth century Noli equipped itself with further fortifications and more than seventy town towers, closing the borgo inside a wall. Several survive, built into later houses — Borghi più belli d'Italia picks out the thirteenth-century Torre del Comune and Torre della Marina, and notes their bold profile and the reddish tone of the brick.

Walk out of the walls to the first cathedral

San Paragorio stands outside the circuit and was the cathedral of Noli until 1572. It is a national monument, declared on 28 December 1890, with a crypt, Trecento frescoes, a thirteenth-century wooden cathedra and glazed ceramic bacini of Sicilian or North African origin set into the outside of the apse.

And climb to Monte Ursino

The castle stands over the town on the hill where Noli was first founded. Beyond it, paths run up the headland: about three kilometres to the top of Capo Noli at 276 metres.

Noli is a small state that never stopped behaving like one. Six centuries of self-government left it a council chamber, a loggia, a civic tower and a wall, all inside four square kilometres, and the town still reads as a capital in miniature rather than as a village.

Its patron came by sea and arrived late. Sant'Eugenio, a bishop from Africa, was buried on the islet of Bergeggi in 505 and translated to Noli in 1192 — the same year the republic was constituted. His feast is the second Sunday in July.

The sea is still the economy, in a way it is not elsewhere on this coast. Local fishermen work nightly; the cicciarelli, a fish dish, carries a Slow Food Presidium; and in the valleys between Noli and Finale Ligure the vineyards produce Lumassina.

Three famous people are recorded as passing through, and the town has not forgotten. The plaques under the loggia name Dante, Columbus and Giordano Bruno. For a borgo of this size that is an unusually well-kept visitors' book.

The fishermen are not a display. Noli is one of very few Ligurian coastal towns where local fishermen still go out nightly in small motorboats and land the catch in the morning. The boats drawn up at the top of the beach are working boats.

About three hundred people live inside the borgo. That is Borghi più belli d'Italia's figure for the historic centre, against 2,444 in the comune as a whole. The caruggi are narrow, many of them spanned by supporting arches, and they are residential.

Nothing here is ticketed, which is not the same as nothing being private. No admission or opening hour is published for the castle, the churches or the towers by the comune or by anyone else; the towers in particular are built into houses.

The cape and the plateau are protected ground. A site of community interest under Natura 2000 spans Noli, Bergeggi, Quiliano, Spotorno, Vado Ligure and Vezzi Portio, and it holds plants that exist in few other places — among them the Campanula sabatia, the Convolvulus sabatius and the Leuzea conifera, the last at risk of extinction in the wild. Stay on the paths.

And the beach has a flag to keep. The Bandiera blu is awarded on bathing-water quality and the management of the shore; it is renewed, not permanent.

Walking Noli is free, because nothing in it is ticketed. No admission price is published for the castle of Monte Ursino, San Paragorio, the concattedrale di San Pietro, the Palazzo del Comune or the towers — not by the comune, not by anyone else read for this page.

That is an absence rather than a guarantee. It means nothing is sold and nothing is advertised, not that every door is open.

The beach is where the money goes. Noli is a Bandiera blu bathing resort; in season the cost of a day here is the cost of a lido, a lunch and parking, and in August a bed.

Eating the local thing is cheap and specific. The cicciarelli carry a Slow Food Presidium, and the wine to ask for is Lumassina, grown in the valleys between here and Finale Ligure.