The Flights of Steps

The geomorphological conformation of the site where La Spezia stands is hilly. The Old Town, concentrated in a narrow space between St. George castle and piazza Sant’Agostino and the actual piazza Beverini, consists of an upper zone, significantly called the Poggio with the fortress standing at the top, as already seen, and an ancient part lower down lying behind the coastline and roads where it was easier to conduct community life and trade.
This type of geographical position certainly had its effects on the city’s layout, where there were paths to reach the castle and the religious sites standing between the valley and the top of the Poggio (Augustine monastery and the Clarisse convent), with houses built along them in a fan shape due to their specific conformation: at the top being obviously the castle and the “sticks” of the fan were precisely the steps and paths leading downwards and branching off to reach strategic points in the city.
Said historical situation, now greatly altered, can be seen from the old maps, especially the papers drawn up by Vinzoni and De Cotte around the middle of the XVIII century.
Residential type of urbanization started along the foot of the hills and the area near to the castle with the opening of via dei Colli (built as a military road at the end of the XIX century and extended in 1929), via XX Settembre (built between 1870 and 1884) and via XXVII Marzo (1925-1932). The flights of steps still located in the city, as we actually know them, were in fact designed and built in this period. A few of them retrace the same historical paths such as most probably the steps up to the castle and the Vanicella steps, others serve the “new” city, such as in the case of the Spallanzani or Fondega steps, behind piazza Verdi, there where Countess of Castiglione’s large estate stood.
Moreover in some cases the name of these flights of steps is evidence of historical situations or how the district was exploited: for example the place-name Fondega, shows that there was once a fondeco, that is to say a store house for the ancient port in this area, probably in the direction of what is now piazza Verdi; the same for the name of the Bastia steps, recalling the bastion built in the second half of the XVI century to support St. George castle on the site where the university campus now stands; again Vanicella stands for a small course of water, now flowing under via Chiodo, running down from the hills along the side of the castle to feed the small docks where the naval base of the Dukes of Milan once stood in the XV century.