Noli attractions

Everything is inside, or just outside, a wall you can walk in twenty minutes.

The seat of the republic. The Palazzo del Comune of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with its civic tower, four ogival polifore and a restored sundial on the seaward facade, and inside a seventeenth-century council chamber holding late-medieval fresco fragments — together with the adjoining Loggia della Repubblica Nolese and its plaques to Dante, Columbus and Giordano Bruno.

The first cathedral, outside the walls. San Paragorio, Ligurian Romanesque of the eleventh century on a palaeochristian church, an Italian national monument since 1890, with ceramic bacini set into the apse, arcosolium tombs in banded white and black stone, a crypt, Trecento frescoes, a thirteenth-century wooden cathedra and a crucifix compared to the Volto Santo of Lucca.

The cathedral that replaced it. The concattedrale di San Pietro, built from tithes on the fishermen's holiday catch and still called San Pietro dei Pescatori, which took the cathedral title in 1572 and holds a silver processional cross of 1417 and the fifteenth-century Pallio di Sant'Eugenio.

And the castle on the hill where the town began. Monte Ursino, a circular keep inside an irregular polygonal enclosure, rebuilt in 1552 to take artillery.

Beyond them: the walls and what remains of more than seventy towers, the church of San Francesco whose orientation was reversed in the seventeenth century, and the ruins of San Michele Arcangelo, built by monks of Lérins around the year 1000.