How Finalborgo was built and evolved over time

The wall came first and defines everything after it. Toward the end of the twelfth century Enrico II Del Carretto began using the title marquis of Finale and girded the urban nucleus with walls, giving rise to the burgus Finarii. The circuit reinforced the natural moat of the two torrent beds on three sides, with the Becchignolo spur closing the fourth.

The most striking survival is a tower whose church was replaced around it. The Gothic basilica of 1372-1375 was damaged in the late sixteenth century, became too small, and was almost entirely demolished in the mid-seventeenth century to make way for a new building with its plan rotated ninety degrees. The new church kept the original octagonal bell tower with slender bifore, and the Gothic apse and apsidal chapels survive partly, in the narrow gap between the new church and the Borgo wall.

The convent was built in stages across two centuries. Santa Caterina was founded in 1359; its church dates from the first half of the fifteenth century, originally three naves on columns of Pietra di Finale; and its two communicating cloisters were built between 1500 and 1530 at the wish of cardinal Carlo Domenico Del Carretto.

The palaces were rebuilt rather than replaced, and their facades show it. The Palazzo del Tribunale existed by the early fourteenth century and was restructured in 1462 for Giovanni I Del Carretto by Giorgio Molinari, who changed interiors and exteriors with a new staircase and intermediated bifore; its interiors were revisited again in 1781. Its facade is of great interest precisely because it carries both fifteenth-century painted decoration and the traces of every later intervention.

And one tower was rebuilt as a jail. In 1864 the Genoese directorate of the Genio militare rebuilt the inside of Santa Caterina's campanile as punishment cells, each about 170 by 90 centimetres with no opening but a spyhole over the door. The campanile had already lost its cuspide in the 1887 earthquake that struck the Ligurian Ponente.