The streets are wide and the houses tall and yellow...".
Thus La Spezia as seen by Ernest Hemingway, who typically paints an exceptional portrait in just a few words: a town of palazzi and spacious streets, from which the sunny warmth of the plaster façades emerges.And this is the impression we still get on visiting La Spezia: bright houses overlooking the sea. The very proportions of the palazzi show the extraordinary development the town has undergone since the second half of the 19th century, the time when the great Naval Arsenal which the Savoy royal family decided to build changed its destiny and appearance so radically.

The history of La Spezia however actually goes back to ancient times. As the capital of the short-lived seigniory of Niccolò Fieschi between 1256 and 1273 it was inevitably bound up with the vicissitudes of Genoa up to the fall of the Ligurian Republic, and hence adapted itself as it grew to meet the demands of the Ligurian capital. And its Ligurian essence can still be perceived both in the street arrangement and in the types of building and decoration.It can be perceived when walking down the carrugio* which cuts the old town in half, via Prione. This street is called after the pietrone ("big stone"; in La Spezia dialect prione) from which public announcements were read. We enter it from the sea front and pass by half-concealed traces of past history: carved stone slabs, capitals and doorways of 14th-century sandstone, Gothic windows whose shapes are already shyly moving towards the Renaissance, mannerist and baroque pinnacles and decorations like those on the two palazzi formerly belonging to the Doria marquises and the Massa princes.

Ligurian towns are made up of just such carrugi, where "tower houses" have been joined together for defence purposes and form a continuous building. Another typical feature are the slight widenings of the street where trading and social life could be conducted with greater ease; these are not squares (piazze) as such but rather courts (campi). We have for example the campo degli Agostiniani, now piazza Sant'Agostino, at the top of which the convent founded in 1390 once stood. Here the baroque residences which run in a single, continuous block down towards the sea front are seen to have been built by joining together pre-existing "tower-houses", marked marble or sandstone traces of which can still be seen in the bases.

But the monument which is still the most representative of the history of the town of La Spezia is certainly the Castello di San Giorgio (Castle of St. George). This stands on a low hill called the Poggio, and dominates the old town; it has undergone numerous, continuous modifications, which are documented from the second half of the 16th century at least. This would in fact seem to be the date of the building of the imposing tower which was included in the upper portion of the structure; all that remains of this are the foundations, the parapets with their loopholes for archers on the north side facing the outer garden, and the fragment of the city walls running down from the castle towards via XX Settembre. In 1443 the castle underwent a radical transformation with the addition of the lower section, designed for the use of firearms.A century later, in 1554, the top part of the building was wholly renovated.

In this same year an important supporting defensive structure called the Bastia ("stockade") was erected. This structure is not preserved today, but its remains have recently been rediscovered on the site of the university campus, above the castle. Finally, in 1607, when Genoa decided to reorganise the Gulf defence system, the castle was given its final shape. It was reopened to the public in 1998 and now, after a long, thorough process of restoration, houses the Civic Archaeological Collections

http://www.comune.sp.it/citta/guida_en/luoghi_storici_en.htm