Castello di Monte Ursino, Noli site features

The form is a round tower inside an irregular ring. The circular keep is enclosed by a polygonal enclosure of irregular form, with the remains of two visibly more recent towers.

That irregularity is the hill, not carelessness. A polygonal circuit follows the summit it sits on; the two later towers are the parts that were added or rebuilt after the original enclosure went up.

Older fabric survives around it. The hill keeps ancient elements and constructions of Noli's primitive settlement from the twelfth century, when the Del Carretto held the territory.

It is one of three military works in the comune, and the only one still standing. The Forte del Portello, built in 1565 to defend the port and the shore, no longer exists; it was later connected to the torre dello Sperone, which housed on its top floor the prison for the gravest offenders. A third work, the Fortezza dell'Eremo, stands at Capo Noli.

Its condition is restored ruins. That is how the encyclopaedia's dedicated article describes it, along with municipal ownership — though that article carries an explicit warning that it is entirely unsourced, so both are given as its claims rather than as established fact.

The first of Noli's three foundations

The town was founded three times and this hill was the first, before the move down beside San Paragorio and the final settlement inside the walls. The sequence is the most interesting thing about Noli's topography and it starts here.

A circular keep in a polygonal ring

The maschio circolare inside an irregular polygonal enclosure — the enclosure following the shape of the summit, with the remains of two visibly more recent towers in it.

Rebuilt in 1552 for artillery

The present form dates from that year, the work of captain Andrea da Bergamo on the advice of the Republic of Genoa, and the stated purpose was adapting the towers and walls to the new instruments of war. A castle rebuilt for cannon on a hill above a four-square-kilometre republic.

Built together with the town wall

The first structure of the twelfth century came with the wall circuit connected to it in defence of the borgo — the same circuit that by the thirteenth century enclosed more than seventy town towers.

Del Carretto ground

The hill conserves elements of the primitive settlement from the twelfth century, under the Del Carretto — the marquises of Finale from whom Noli separated when it became a republic in 1192. Borghi più belli d'Italia calls it the castle of the Del Carretto marquises and dates it to the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.

Two lost works and a prison tower

The Forte del Portello of 1565 is gone; the torre dello Sperone it was linked to held the prison for the gravest offenders on its top floor; and the Fortezza dell'Eremo stands out at Capo Noli.