THE CITY AND ITS HISTORY

“The streets are wide and the houses tall and yellow…”. This was how Ernest Hemingway saw it, just a few words for an exceptional description: a city made up of large houses and wide streets where plastered facades irradiate sunny warmth.
And this is still the impression one gets visiting La Spezia, houses full of light facing onto the sea and it is exactly the size of the houses that gives one to understand the extraordinary development starting from the second half of the XIX Century, that is to say from when the great Naval Arsenal commissioned by the Savoy’s transformed the best part of its fate and aspect.
But La Spezia has in reality an ancient history. Capital of the short-lived Niccolò Fieschi seigniory in the period between 1256 and 1273, inevitably linked with the Genoese vicissitudes until the fall of the Republic of Liguria, it grew and changed to develop following the lines of the Ligurian capital.
In fact this Ligurian influence is still visible in the urban layout as well as in the types of buildings and decorations. It can be seen by going along the carrugio, the narrow street dividing the Old Town into two, called via del Prione taking its name from pietrone or large stone, in local dialect in fact prione, from where public announcements were read. Going up from the sea you will see partly hidden but evident traces of past history: engraved stones, capitals and portals in 14th century sandstone, double lancet windows vaguely reminiscent of the future renaissance style, mannerism and baroque pediments and decorations similar to those adorning the portals of the palaces once belonging to the Doria family and the Princes of Massa.
Ligurian towns are made up exactly of carrugi, narrow streets where houses are generally adjoining, houses with towers incorporated for defensive purposes and small openings, where there was more room to carry out business and social life, not large squares but more like courts. So here you have what was the small Augustinian court, now piazza Sant’Agostino, where once upon a time there was a convent founded in 1390 in the upper part: here the baroque manors standing in a continuous row as far as the sea incorporate the old tower houses, clearly seen by the traces of marble and sandstone along the bottom part of the buildings.
But St. George castle is certainly the most emblematic monument of La Spezia’s historical past. Standing on a small rise called the Poggio, dominating the Old Town, it has continuously undergone construction works documented from at least the second half of the XIV century: the enormous tower incorporated into the upper part of the structure, where only a part of its foundations can be seen today, the walls with their slits for the archers facing north towards the outside garden and the surviving parts of the city walls which led down from the castle towards via XX Settembre, can in fact be traced back to this date. In 1443 the castle underwent major restoration works with the addition of a wing to the lower part of the castle, built for using firearms, whilst works on totally upgrading the top part of the building were begun a century later in 1554. The works for erecting a major supporting defensive work called the Bastia (bastion) no longer standing today, also go back to this date, but ruins have come to light recently from under the university campus, beyond the castle. Lastly in 1607, work was done on giving the castle the appearance it has today when Genoa embarked on a project to integrate and upgrade its defensive system along the Gulf. Opened up to the public again in 1998, after lengthy attentive restoration works, the castle now holds the Public Archaeological collections, which we shall be dealing with later on.

EXODUS
The city of La Spezia is known as the “door to Sion”, as at the end of the second World War, it became the point of departure for the survivors from the Nazi concentration camps. From the summer of 1945 to the spring of 1948 over 23,000 Jews managed to leave Italy clandestinely for Palestine. After lengthy tormented vicissitudes, the ships Fede, Fenice and Exodus managed to take away everyone from the Spezia gulf, to the point that on the Israeli geographical maps La Spezia is called «Schàar Zion», Door to Sion.
La Spezia holds the Exodus Award devoted to inter-cultural exchange every year to commemorate this important event.