How Finale Ligure was built and evolved over time

The local stone has a name and it is everywhere. Pietra di Finale faces the tower of the neo-Gothic Castello Vuillermin, built 1936–1941; it makes the columns of the portico under the nineteenth-century loggia at Palazzo De Raymondi; and it built the thirteenth-century Romanesque bell tower beside the abandoned church of San Cipriano at Calvisio Vecchia.

The Torre dei Diamanti is the finest piece of building in the comune. At Castel Gavone, dated about 1490 by the castle's own record and perhaps 1492 by the comune overview, carenata e bugnata — keeled and faced in rusticated blocks cut to a diamond point — and described as an extraordinary example of seigneurial architecture inspired by the military architect Francesco di Giorgio. Genoa demolished most of the castle in 1715, two years after buying the marquisate, and the tower survived.

Castel San Giovanni is Spanish military engineering. Built 1642–43 as a typical Spanish fortress, dominating Finalborgo — low, massive work for artillery rather than a medieval keep.

Castelfranco was built against a family. Raised by the Republic of Genoa in 1365 in an anti-Carrettesca function, it was later modified and surrounded by other fortresses whose bastions reached down to the coast at Finalmarina.

One church was turned ninety degrees. The basilica of San Biagio at Finalborgo was laid out by the Finale architect Andrea Storace in the seventeenth century on the fourteenth-century church, after rotating the plan through 90° — and the earlier apse and bell tower survived the operation. (Finalborgo has its own page here, and the basilica is described there.)

And the seafront palaces are Genoese in habit. Palazzi Ferri and Mendaro on the upper side of piazza Vittorio Emanuele II carry typical seventeenth-century facades with large windows in three superimposed orders; Palazzo Buraggi, of the late sixteenth century, has facades divided by elongated pilasters with Corinthian capitals.