How Noli was built and evolved over time

The town was built facing the water and then the road arrived. The historic centre presents a porticoed front that was originally directly on the beach and now stands on the Aurelia. The record compares the arrangement to Sottoripa in Genoa — an arcade as the working face of a seafaring town.

Its defence was vertical and repeated. In the thirteenth century Noli built more than seventy town towers and a wall. Borghi più belli d'Italia describes the surviving ones by their bold profile and the reddish tone of the brick, naming the thirteenth-century Torre del Comune and Torre della Marina.

Later houses swallowed the towers rather than replacing them. Palazzo Viale-Salvarezza is a seventeenth-century building fused among pre-existing medieval ones and raised around the twelfth-century torre della Marina and a second smaller tower.

The castle was modernised for gunpowder. The first structure on Monte Ursino dates from the twelfth century, with the wall circuit that defended the borgo; the present form belongs to the rebuilding of 1552 by captain Andrea da Bergamo, on the advice of the Republic of Genoa, chiefly in adapting the towers and walls to new weapons. A circular keep stands inside an irregular polygonal enclosure with the remains of two visibly later towers. (Borghi più belli d'Italia dates the Genoese renovation to 1522.)

The port got its own fort and its own prison. The Forte del Portello, built in 1565 to defend the harbour and shore and since lost, was later linked to the torre dello Sperone, whose top floor held the prison for the gravest offenders. A third work, the Fortezza dell'Eremo, stands at Capo Noli.

And the streets were built to be covered. The borgo keeps its narrow caruggi, many of them spanned by supporting archetti — the arches that hold opposing houses apart and let the lanes stay as narrow as they are.