Torre di Punta Pagana

On the headland between San Michele di Pagana and the Prelo cove, a thick stone watchtower built in the sixteenth century overlooks the Gulf of Tigullio. Donated to the FAI in 1981, it retains features recovered during restoration, including the gun room and herringbone brick floor.

Why it matters

This watchtower represents a later phase of Genoese coastal defence than the medieval castle beside Rapallo’s harbour. The tower was an answer to a specific trauma — the corsair raid of 1549 — and it worked as a watch post in a system that warned the gulf's villages of landings from the sea. The tower stands on a promontory of maritime pines and Mediterranean scrub. The FAI describes it as one of the Ligurian coastal towers that has remained relatively untouched by urban development. Together with the 1625 fortress next door, the headland compresses two centuries of defensive strategy into a few hundred metres of coast.

What to notice

• The sheer mass of the structure: a stone sentinel set on the cliff edge, windowless on the seaward approach, built to shelter a garrison rather than to welcome guests.
• The camera della bombarda, the gun room at roof level, brought back to legibility during the FAI's conservation work — the tower's fighting floor.
• The original floor of bricks laid in a herringbone pattern, recovered during restoration.
• Seventeenth-century plasterwork retained on the exterior walls, a rare continuous surface for a working military building.
• The tower’s position above the Tigullio Gulf, with San Michele di Pagana, Prelo Cove and the Portofino promontory in view.
• The adjacent Castello di Punta Pagana, begun in 1625: a Renaissance fortress now owned by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which can be seen only from outside.

Context and history

On the morning of 4 July 1549 the corsair admiral known as Dragut landed his men and assaulted Rapallo, an episode that frightened the inhabitants of San Michele into demanding protection. Money followed: 600 lire were set aside on 16 May 1562 by Gerolamo Giustiniani, the podestà who served as Rapallo's chief magistrate, once the Republic of Genoa's Senate took up the request, and in the second half of the sixteenth century the tower rose as a guard post against pirate incursions. With Rapallo's older waterfront castle it formed part of the defensive complex of the Tigullio gulf.

The neighbouring fortress belongs to a later threat. In 1625, during the conflict between the Republic and Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, Genoa fortified the same headland against a feared Franco-Piedmontese attack. That castle, with its villa and park, passed to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and remains closed to visits — an important distinction for anyone walking the promontory today, since the tower and the fortress are separate properties with separate histories.

In 1981 the De Grossi family donated the tower to the FAI. During restoration in the 1980s, the trust recovered the gun room and brick floor, conserved the old plaster and protected the pine woodland around the tower.