How Alassio was built and evolved over time

Alassio was built three times: as a hill refuge, as a walled borgo, and as a resort that ate the walls.

First the hill. There was no Roman settlement. The earliest inhabitants were Ingaunian Ligurians, probably refugees from Albenga after the Roman invasion, who settled on a hill called Caste. The casone — dry-stone shelters for shepherds, still visible on the paths below monte Pisciavino — belong to that older, upland way of using this ground, as do the terraces that Napoleon's administration later rebuilt.

Then the coast, from the twelfth century. Families came down from the surrounding hill settlements, moved along the shore, and founded the Burgum Alaxi. A church to Sant'Ambrogio was raised to serve them. The pattern is the opposite of the usual Ligurian one: most of this coast moved uphill for safety, and Alassio moved down to the water for trade.

Then the wall, between 1521 and 1557. Pirates and the rivalry of Albenga produced more than 1.6 kilometres of circuit with bastions and towers, the vulnerable Borgo Barusso to the west and Borgo Coscia to the east, the latter covered by two towers but left outside the main wall. The fossao de li roxotti — today the rio Cardellino — was the moat on the eastern side. The porta di San Vincenzo, part of the Bastione di Barluffo, controlled the way in. Main works finished in 1540, the whole in 1557, when Genoa pushed to secure its coastal towns.

The walls then became the resort. The Bastione di Barluffo adapted over time to hold shops on its ground floor — it is still commerce today. The Bastione di Piazza was demolished to make room for the seafront promenade. The bastion on the pier was removed as part of a political programme: a civic list won the election of 29 June 1902 promising exactly that, along with the promenade from Via Giancardi to Portosalvo and a road from the station to Piazza Freghetti. The ancient church of San Vincenzo in what is now Piazza Partigiani went the same way, demolished and rebuilt west of the centre at the end of the 1930s. The casino of 1912 was pulled down in 1936 to make the square itself.

The infrastructure arrived in order and left dates. The Catasto under Napoleon — the first cartographic survey of the territory. The wooden railway station of 1872, its goods warehouse of 1888, and the present passenger building completed by the engineer Achille Manfredini in 1915, with three platforms linked by an underpass. The Palazzo del Comune of 1904. The Cappelletta to those lost at sea, 1929. The war memorial, 1931. The Valbona cemetery, 1934. An overpass begun in 1938 to remove the level crossing east of town, finished only after the war. And the mole, rebuilt from 1935, destroyed by the retreating Germans and rebuilt once more in 1952.

Two pieces of that infrastructure were never finished. The railway through the comune is still single-track, and the plan to sink the line and build an underground station — as was done at Sanremo on the same route — remains a project. And the A10, which crosses the communal territory, was built with no junction dedicated exclusively to Alassio: the roads that actually serve the town are the SS1 Via Aurelia, linking Albenga to the east and Laigueglia to the west, the SP18 to Testico, the SP55 Bossoleto-Crocetta and the SS717 of Villanova d'Albenga.

On the hill, a different kind of building. Villa della Pergola began in 1876 on a residence of the Counts della Lengueglia: an Anglo-Indian villino called Casa Napier, then from 1880 the main villa in eclectic style, with a dome clad in polychrome majolica of Albisola. The garden around it was made by turning an ordinary Ligurian agricultural holding into a park, with terracotta balustrades marking the viewpoints.