Alassio attractions

The whole of the old town fits in one lane and one street, and the rest is on the hill.

In the centre. The Budello — officially Piazza XX Settembre — runs the length of the old town between houses of the fifteen- and sixteen-hundreds, from Borgo Coscia at the Laigueglia end to Piazza Partigiani at the Albenga end. Parallel to it, on corso Dante Alighieri, the Muretto carries about a thousand ceramic tiles of autographs, begun 1951-1953 by the painter Mario Berrino, with Eros Pellini's bronze Innamorati above it and the Muretto dei Cani of 2013 at the street's far end.

The parish church. Sant'Ambrogio, a parish since 1507, with a Renaissance facade, a Romanesque-Gothic bell tower of the fourteenth century inherited from the earlier building, and canvases by the Genoese seventeenth century — Bernardo Castello and Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari.

On the first hill. The Giardini di Villa della Pergola: 2.2 hectares laid out from 1876, curated since the 2006 rescue by Paolo Pejrone, holding the most important wisteria collection in Italy and the largest agapanthus collection in Europe. Guided visit only, ten minutes on foot from the station.

And the ones that have no page here. Two towers: the Torrione Saraceno in Borgo Coscia, built by Genoa in the sixteenth century and private property since the mid-twentieth, not open; and the Torre di Vegliasco on the ridge, probably fifteenth-century Genoese work, which tradition dates to the tenth century and puts Adelasia inside — she stands on top of it in the town's coat of arms. Among the churches: Sant'Anna ai Monti, erected around 940 by the Benedictines of the Gallinaria and the oldest dated building in the comune; Santa Croce, raised in the eleventh century by the same monks at the cape that bears its name; the sanctuary of Nostra Signora della Guardia of the twelfth century on monte Tirasso; the Santissima Annunziata of 1382; and the Cappuccini church, whose pulpit of 1503 is two centuries older than the building around it.