Punta Crena, Varigotti historical timeline

Last updated on October 19, 2026

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Everything on this headland is a response to something arriving by sea. The Byzantines fortified it to protect a harbour that tied the Ligurian coast to the fortifications inland; a Lombard king destroyed it because the Byzantines could be reached and he could not be reached back. Nine centuries later the Turks came and a watchtower went up. Between those two moments the village itself lived on the promontory's eastern slope and then left, as the harbour filled. The olive grove is the only thing here that was planted rather than built, and it has outlasted all of it.

Chronology

6th-7th c. A Byzantine castrum is placed on the promontory to defend the port below, in what is now the baia dei Saraceni. The civil buildings stand by the port and on the eastern flank, where a perimeter wall of them still remains.
643 The Lombard king Rotari destroys the settlement, sweeping the Byzantines from the Ligurian Riviera; Varicottis falls out of use because the Lombards have no fleet. The ruins of the castrum on this headland are what that campaign left.
13th-15th c. The village stands on the eastern slope and the saddle beside it until the harbour silts, then moves west of the promontory to where Varigotti is today. Medieval remains dated to the fifteenth century survive on the slope it left.
1341 The harbour this headland was fortified to protect is filled in by the Genoese, after a defeat of Finale by Genoa — a claim the record itself calls controversial. The promontory loses the thing it existed to defend.
1559 After an invasion by the Turks, a watchtower is built on the summit. It is the last fortification raised here and the only one still standing to its full height.
1582 Genoa, allied with Noli since 1202, builds the torretta delle Streghe between this promontory and Capo Noli to mark its possessions. It is still there and still marks the boundary between Finale Ligure and Noli.
1853 Varigotti's roughly 700 inhabitants live from fishing, from olives and citrus, and from quarried stone. The secular olive grove on the seaward flank of this promontory is what remains of that economy.
1995 Restoration begins on the church of San Lorenzo mid-slope, the first in Liguria to lift its materials by helicopter. It is the clearest published statement that nothing here is reachable by road.
2021 The final scenes of the Rai 1 series Blanca are filmed at the tower in December. The tower is photogenic enough for a national broadcast, which is a fair description of its present condition.

Four ruins and why they are all still here

This promontory was never cleared, and the reason is the same one that makes it hard to visit: there is no road. The castrum was destroyed in 643 and left; the village on the eastern slope was abandoned rather than demolished, so its fifteenth-century walls stayed; the convent beside the tower fell in, undocumented; and the 1559 tower simply had no further use after the Barbary threat receded. The Byzantine perimeter wall survived all of it. Only the olive grove was ever maintained, because it produced something. The one modern intervention on the headland is the 1995 restoration of the church below the summit, and that needed a helicopter. The Museo Archeologico del Finale now guides visits here, which is the first organised attention the site has had.

Verified against Wikipedia, October 2026.

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Wikipedia

Sources & verification Covers the sourced claims on this page.

Checked against Wikipedia — The origins of Varigotti are dated by some to the second century A.D., and by others to the Byzantine era; in favour of the first hypothesis, fragments and tombs datable from the third to the seventh century were found in the church of San Lorenzo. After the fall of the Roman Empire the port of Varigotti, located in the present-day baia dei Saraceni, offered a safe landing for the Byzantine ships that maintained the links with the fortifications still active along the Ligurian Apennines and the Maritime Alps. The orography separated Varigotti and nearby Noli from the Po hinterland, protecting them from possible barbarian incursions. The port was defended with a Byzantine castrum placed on Punta Crena, while the civil buildings were placed near the port and on the eastern slope of the promontory, of which a perimeter wall still remains today., This settlement was destroyed by the Lombard king Rotari in 643, when he swept the Byzantines from the Ligurian Riviera. Varicottis, as the military and port centre was then called, fell into disuse because the Lombards possessed no fleet. The destruction was reported by the chronicler pseudo-Fredegar, who cites Varicotti on a par with Albenga, Savona, Genoa, Oderzo and Luni. It is believed that the settlement of Varigotti itself, until the silting of the port that stood in the present baia dei Saraceni, was on the eastern slope of the mountain and the adjacent saddle, where medieval remains dated to the fifteenth century survive., In the centuries that followed, Finale Ligure clashed with the Republic of Genoa. After a defeat of Finale by Genoa, the port of Varigotti was silted up by the work of the Genoese in 1341, although this fact is controversial. In the following centuries the fate of Varigotti followed that of the Finale and its clashes with Genoa. In 1559, after an invasion by the Turks, the watchtower was built on the summit of Punta Crena. In 1582 Genoa, allied with Noli since 1202, built a turret between Punta Crena and Capo Noli to mark the boundary between the possessions; the turret, called "delle Streghe", remains today and still marks the boundary between the two comuni. In 1602 Finale passed under Spanish rule, and was ceded to Genoa in 1713., Among the civil monuments of Varigotti: the promontory of Punta Crena, characterised by a centuries-old olive grove overlooking the sea, preserves an ancient Saracen watchtower built in 1559, and beside it are the remains of a convent; the ruins of the Byzantine castrum, dating from the Byzantine era and destroyed by Rotari; and the mole, named after the film director Renato Castellani. Among the religious monuments: the parish church of San Lorenzo, of Baroque forms with a late Gothic bell tower; the church of San Lorenzo overlooking the baia dei Saraceni, of very ancient origins, which was the first parish church of Varigotti until 1586; and the oratorio di Sant'Antonio Abate in the rione of Varigotti. Varigotti is a renowned tourist destination; the greatest flow of holidaymakers is registered in the summer period., The locality was constituted a free autonomous comune with Napoleonic rule and the creation of the Ligurian Republic. In 1853 Varigotti counted around 700 inhabitants, devoted above all to fishing, to the cultivation of olives and citrus, and to the extraction of stone from a quarry. In 1869, while the works of construction of the Genoa-Ventimiglia railway line were in full swing, Varigotti was aggregated -- not without resistance -- to the borgo of Finale Pia, together with Calvisio, also an autonomous comune at the time. In 1927 it finally became an integral part of the newly constituted comune of Finale Ligure., The church of San Lorenzo rises halfway up the slope on the promontory at Punta Crena, dominating the so-called Baia dei Saraceni, natural port of the rione of Varigotti at Finale Ligure. The church is of a single nave with a square apse lit by single-light windows and a more recent part -- the wall towards the sea -- on which two doors in Gothic style open; the brick cross-vault of the sacristy also dates from the same period, the fourteenth century. The wall on the upslope side should instead be earlier than the year 1000. No longer a parish, the old church was later used as the chapel of the cemetery until the seventeenth century. The church was the target of a bomb during the Second World War, which damaged its roof, left broken open for many years. From 1995 the building was the object of restoration works, the first in Liguria in which a helicopter was used to lift the materials. The numerous finds of imperial and early medieval date recovered in the area of the ancient church, among them a sarcophagus of the third or fourth century, are today conserved at the archaeological museum of Finale, housed in the rooms of the ancient conventual complex of Santa Caterina at Finalborgo., A Disney-Mondadori comic album, "Paperino e la notte del Saraceno", is largely set in Varigotti, in particular on the watchtower of the hill; the album also has a publication in the Latin language, with the title "Donaldus Anas atque nox saraceni". In the "Filippo" apartment building a ceramic, "Le Quattro Stagioni", by the sculptor Felice Mina is kept. Among the noted holidaymakers of the past is the writer Gina Lagorio, to whom a beach is dedicated; among the more recent, the television presenter Michelle Hunziker. The first chapters of the novel "Ma, insomma, che cosa vuoi?" by V. A. Kocetov (Edizioni Samona e Savelli, 1970) are set in Varigotti and its surroundings. The final scenes of the fiction Blanca, broadcast on Rai 1 in the month of December 2021, were filmed at the tower of Punta Crena at Varigotti., The whole Finale coast became part first of the Aleramic march and then of the territories of Bonifacio Del Vasto. In 1127 the Cistercian monks of the Abbey of Lerins settled in the church of San Lorenzo, a pre-existing monastic cenacle probably dating from the seventh century. In 1162 the march of Savona was constituted, enfeoffed to Enrico Del Carretto, of which Varigotti was a part often contested by the nascent comune of Noli. The monks of Lerins remained until 1177, when the church probably became the parish church of Varigotti -- there being in fact no news of the church until 1356. Varigotti took on importance and prosperity again thanks to the ancient port, which became an important base of maritime defence and attack for the Del Carretto. Meanwhile the population began to move from the port area to the area west of the promontory, where the settlement stands today; here a "compagna" was formed, a free association of the men of the villages with corporate power. At the same time a new church of San Lorenzo was constituted to the west, affiliated to the Pieve finalese, the old San Lorenzo above the port being by then far from the settlement. Given this westward shift, the inhabited nuclei of Pino, Giardino, Chien, Ca dei Mori, la Seva and la Monda were formed and the settlement developed along the coastal strip. (October 2026).

Punta Crena, Varigotti historical timeline

Chronology

Four ruins and why they are all still here

External resources

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