Parco delle Mura e Fortificazioni (Mura Nuove)

Genoa’s seventeenth-century Mura Nuove climb from the coast to the heights above the city, where the wall circuit and forts now form part of a 617-hectare park of meadows and woods. More than sixteen kilometres of paths and roads connect the fortifications.

Why it matters

Petrarch praised Genoa’s walls in the fourteenth century. The surviving Mura Nuove form a triangle from the coast to Monte Peralto, reaching 512 metres at the Sperone bastion. Of a system nearly twenty kilometres long, about twelve kilometres of wall fabric remain.

Since 2008 the Parco delle Mura has protected 617 hectares of hills between the city's two great valleys, the Bisagno and the Polcevera. The fortification belt includes meadows, woods and traces of earlier rural activity, as well as habitats for rare and endemic species.

What to notice

The walls reflect successive phases of Genoa’s expansion. A first ring hugged the hill of Castello in the tenth century; the twelfth-century Barbarossa walls, bounded by the Porta dei Vacca and Porta Soprana gates, still stand in the historic centre; the fourteenth century pushed the line out over Carignano, Castelletto and Prè. After 1536 the Republic converted the medieval curtain into a modern bastioned front against gunpowder artillery, finishing in 1553. The Mura Nuove themselves were the last and greatest response: designed in 1626 after the failed invasion of 1625 and completed in under seven years, by 1633, under a dedicated wall magistracy.

The forts were added in later phases. The Republic raised the first four — Diamante, Santa Tecla, Richelieu and Quezzi — in 1747-1748, during the War of the Austrian Succession that had brought the imperial siege and the Balilla revolt. Between 1815 and about 1840 the Savoy engineer corps added fourteen more forts and two circular towers, until Genoa counted among the most fortified strongholds of Europe. Forte Diamante, at 660 metres, is the highest fort; the Sperone bastion marks the maximum elevation of the wall circuit.

Context and history

The system reflects eighteenth-century military engineering. In the eighteenth century the military engineer Jaques De Sicre worked on the system; he had studied under Blaise-François Pagan, whose work influenced the French school of fortification. Eighteen forts were built in all, three riding the wall line itself; all but three survive, and the network of military roads between them became the park's trail grid. The historic military roads between the forts now form part of the park’s paths.

The park combines the fortifications with a protected natural landscape and the surrounding urban districts. Its paths cross open countryside as well as the remains of the military works.