Walls, gates and buildings

Albenga is a half-unknown jewel: a pre-Roman fortified city in western Liguria, it has passed almost unscathed through the centuries boasting a glorious past. To stroll through the streets of Albenga is to walk through history.
In the heart of the city elegant palaces with wide loggias evoke what the streets must have looked like in the Middle Ages.
Numerous buildings, medieval terraced houses with cut-off towers arranged at the corners of the side streets, with eighteenth-century taste decorations, preserve the carved and decorated wooden ceiling inside and have orders of mullioned and three-light windows; they have a basement with small and irregular stone ashlars, which counts them among the oldest in the city.

Steadfast and resistant to the ravages of time, the old city developed on the ancient Roman layout, spreading out in the form of a quadrilateral, traversed by a dense network of alleys and streets, which intersect at right angles.
The medieval city walls were restructured from the 18th century onward, as the canals around the city were gradually reclaimed and its defensive functions faded, and in the 19th century entire portions were ceded to private individuals.

Four main gates seal and enter the walled city; four like the cardinal points in the direction of which each is located.
To the north, at the ancient route of the Via Iulia Augusta Porta Molino, the city's largest and most important, rebuilt in 1831 in Finale stone, owes its name to the ancient mill on its left.
At the northwest corner of the walls protrudes a large bastion: the Torracco, home of the Malapaga prison, alongside the 17th-century Porta Torlaro.
Also worth seeing are Porta d'Arroscia or St. Siro and Porta del Pertugio or St. Eulalia.

Four, moreover, were the quarters, each named after the patron saint of the church erected within its perimeter. Fulcrum of so much subdivision was the historic monumental center, with its churches, government buildings and the mansions of the upper classes.
On the margins, the life of the people fermented, with its trades, workshops and modest dwellings often leaning against the walls.
The riverbed now houses the remains of an imposing bath building, valuable evidence of the city's culture and prosperity in the days of the Empire, as well as the bases of the pillars of an aqueduct and a number of funerary monuments lined up along the Via Iulia Augusta, north and south of the city.