Discover Complesso conventuale di Santa Caterina, Finalborgo

The former convent of Santa Caterina stands in the piazza of the same name in the historic centre of Finalborgo, at Finale Ligure, in the province of Savona.

It was founded as a tomb. The foundation is datable to 1359, by the Del Carretto family, feudatories of the Marquisate of Finale, who used the complex as a prestigious and monumental burial area.

Dominicans held it for four centuries, and it was spared a sack. It was inhabited from 1381 by Dominican friars; almost as if it were a free and inviolable zone, the convent was spared from the sack carried out in the lands of the marquisate in 1648 by the Republic of Genoa. The order held it until 1802, the Napoleonic suppression.

Since 1931 it has been the museum. The ancient convent houses the archaeological museum of the Finale, a congress hall, and a venue for shows and exhibitions in the adjoining oratory of the Disciplinanti. It also holds the Biblioteca mediateca Finalese, with over 170,000 volumes.

Read it as three buildings joined, from three centuries. A fifteenth-century church, two Renaissance cloisters of 1500-1530 beside it, and a bell tower raised on an apsidal chapel and later gutted for cells.

The church's original form is partly legible and partly reversed. Three naves divided by columns of Pietra del Finale, two square and one semicircular, facing north — and then the apse moved to the opposite side in a later century to meet changing ecclesiastical norms, with further remodelling in the early nineteenth century and again for the prison.

The cloisters are the only unaltered part. Built in one campaign for a cardinal and communicating with each other, they survived every change of use the rest of the complex went through.

And the tower is a hybrid nobody designed. Medieval masonry on an apsidal chapel, a 1561 clock on the outside, nineteenth-century cells on the inside, and a flat top where the cuspide came down in 1887.

It went up in stages across two centuries, then was rebuilt inside in one year. Foundation 1359; church in the first half of the fifteenth century; cloisters 1500-1530.

The local stone is the structural material. The church's original columns were of Pietra del Finale, the limestone quarried in this district and used across Liguria — the same rock the caves are cut in and the climbing is on.

The cardinal paid for the best of it. Carlo Domenico Del Carretto willed the two cloisters, built between 1500 and 1530. He is the same cardinal presented by san Domenico in the Madonna delle Rose that used to hang here and now hangs in San Biagio.

Then the Genio militare rebuilt the inside of a tower. In 1864, cells of about 170 by 90 centimetres were fitted into the campanile, each with a single spyhole over the door and no external opening. Conventual spaces better suited to a hard penitentiary were adapted at the same time.

The last campaign was conservation, not building. From 1995 to 2004, works valorised and conserved the church with its campanile, the two internal cloisters, the walkways, the walls and the botanical garden.

Can I really go in the prison cells?

Yes. They are described as perfectly conserved and visitable. The Campanile di Santa Caterina visit costs €2, runs Sunday mornings only and must be booked by telephone in advance on 019 690020.

How small are they?

About 170 by 90 centimetres each — and with no external opening at all, except a single spyhole above each door.

Who was held here?

Common criminals and political prisoners. The record names socialist anarchists arrested during the Moti di Milano under Bava Beccaris in 1898, so numerous that dormitories were made for them below in the former church; and, in a later period, antifascists and prisoners arrested during the Second World War. Prison use ran from 1864 to 1965.

Why does the clock run backwards?

Because the shadow does. The painted dial is dated 1561 and originally had an anticlockwise rotation, to compensate for the shadow of the sundials, which at this geographical position moves from west towards east — the opposite of the sun's course.

What is actually in the museum?

Prehistoric archaeological finds documenting over 350,000 years of human presence in the territory of the Finale, open here since 1931 — the material from the caves of the Finalese, the Arene Candide among them.

Why is the convent's art in the basilica?

Because the convent was confiscated and the basilica was not. Napoleon took it during the Ligurian Republic and the Italian government took it again in 1864; a good part of San Biagio's present furnishing came from here, including the Madonna delle Rose, the altarpiece from this high altar and the funerary monument of the last Del Carretto marquis, carried across in 1805.