The 8 best hidden beach towns with a food festival in Liguria

Laigueglia

Why visit Laigueglia

Laigueglia sits at six meters on the Riviera di Ponente, sheltered between the two headlands that frame the bay. The name comes from Aquilia, a reference to the Roman eagle standards, and the village grew from a settlement of fishermen who came over from neighboring Andora.

Genoa bought the borough in 1609. Through the seventeenth century the economy ran on shipbuilding and the coral trade, which drew Catalan fishermen to settle in numbers and left behind the Baroque churches that anchor the centro storico today: the parish church with its curved front, and the confraternity oratory with its carved choir and Piola altarpiece.

Behind the beach, the fishermen's grid still reads as caruggi, small squares opening to the sea, houses in pale violet and ochre, the seafront watchtowers standing at the edge where the town once kept watch for raiders by sea. What the coral money built, the town has simply gone on living inside.

What to see in Laigueglia

• Chiesa di San Matteo. The curved façade fronts a Baroque interior where the three altarpieces hang alongside furnishings paid for in the coral years, when the parish stood as the visible return on the fishery's money.
• Oratorio di Santa Maria Maddalena. 1616 oratory of the Confraternita dei Disciplinanti, with a carved wooden choir and an altarpiece by Domenico Piola.
• Centro storico. Fishermen's grid of caruggi behind the beachfront, with houses painted in the pale lilac and ochre traditional to the Ponente coast.

How to get to Laigueglia

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Genova is roughly 85 minutes away by road.

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Borgio Verezzi

Why visit Borgio Verezzi

Borgio Verezzi is two settlements stitched together in 1933 under a single comune in the province of Savona. Borgio sits on the coast at the mouth of the Bottassano stream.

Verezzi rises 200 meters up the Orera hill above it, four old boroughs of stone houses in the warm-pink local rock: Piazza, Roccaro, Crosa, and Poggio, each a cluster rather than a single center. The beach below has held the Bandiera Blu without interruption since 1989.

The two halves of the town read as coast and height rather than old and new: the lower village handles the shoreline and the flag it has kept for decades, the upper village keeps its stone streets and its square turned toward the sea view. What the pairing adds up to is a comune built from two working parts, a beach town below and a hill village above, joined by administration in 1933 but still legible as separate places.

What to see in Borgio Verezzi

• Grotte di Valdemino. Dated to 1933, the caves run through chambers where small underground lakes sit beneath the karst rock, the route winding through passages carved out over time.
• Piazza Sant'Agostino. Main square of Verezzi, framed by pink-stone houses with a view down to the sea. The village skyline serves as backdrop for the festival's summer stage.
• Chiesa di San Pietro Apostolo. Neoclassical parish church built in 1789 on the foundations of the medieval Burgum Albinganeum castle, with a white façade and two bell towers.

How to get to Borgio Verezzi

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Genova is roughly 69 minutes away by road.

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Noli

Why visit Noli

Noli sits at four meters on the Riviera di Ponente, fifty kilometers southwest of Genoa. From 1192 to 1797 it was an independent maritime republic, the fifth alongside Genova, Pisa, Venezia and Amalfi, holding the Capo Noli headland and a stretch of coast under its own flag and protected by alliance with Genoa.

The medieval walls still ring the centro storico, and the survivors of an original eight defensive towers still rise above the rooftops, including the Torre dei Quattro Canti and the Torre Papone. Outside the walls stands the Basilica di San Paragorio, an eleventh-century Romanesque church and one of the most important early medieval buildings in Liguria, with a wooden crucifix from the twelfth century and a bishop's throne carved into a single block of stone.

The Capo Noli cliffs end the bay to the south, with footpaths leading to grottos and a hermitage in the rock. The litoraneo carries the Bandiera Blu.

What to see in Noli

• Basilica di San Paragorio. Eleventh-century Romanesque church outside the walls, with a twelfth-century wooden crucifix and a bishop's throne carved from a single block.
• Torre dei Quattro Canti. Surviving medieval defensive tower inside the walled centro storico, one of eight that originally ringed the maritime republic.
• Torre Papone. Second medieval tower of the original defensive ring, still standing above the rooftops of the centro storico.

How to get to Noli

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Genova is roughly 58 minutes away by road.

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Camogli

Why visit Camogli

Camogli sits on the west side of the Portofino peninsula, twenty kilometers from Genova on the Golfo Paradiso. The earliest record dates to the tenth century, when it was already a tuna and shrimp fishing port.

By the nineteenth century, the town's fleet of merchant sailing ships ran to several hundred vessels and Camogli was called the city of a thousand white sails. After the naval defeat at Abukir against the British, the camogliesi shipowners reinvested in building merchant sailers under contract to the major European states.

The painted façades of the seafront houses, with their false windows and trompe-l'oeil cornices, served the returning sailors as recognition marks from sea. The Castello della Dragonara, built in the thirteenth century, still guards the harbor.

Every second Sunday of May, the Sagra del Pesce fries thirty thousand portions of fish in a single giant pan on the wharf, in honor of San Fortunato. San Fruttuoso, the eleventh-century abbey reachable by boat or trail, sits in the next cove.

What to see in Camogli

• Castello della Dragonara. Thirteenth-century fortress guarding the harbor, used as municipal seat and now a venue for exhibitions and cultural events.
• Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta. Parish basilica next to the castle on the harbor, baroque interior with marble inlays and seventeenth-century paintings.
• Abbazia di San Fruttuoso. Eleventh-century Benedictine abbey in the next cove, reachable by boat or by the coastal trail across the Portofino peninsula.

How to get to Camogli

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Genova is roughly 33 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Camogli

Recco

Why visit Recco

Recco sits on a small inlet of the Golfo Paradiso between Sori and Camogli, fifteen kilometers from Genova. The town's viaduct made it a strategic Allied target in the second world war; the 1943 bombings killed 127 inhabitants and left the town to be rebuilt through the late 1940s and early 1950s, so the church, the bridge and much of the fabric standing today date from that reconstruction rather than before it.

The focaccia has documented origins in the nineteenth century, well before the war or the IGP designation gave it formal status, and it is made in a small cluster of towns along this stretch of coast, of which Recco is only one, though the one that gives the dish its name. Pro Recco's history runs on a separate track entirely, a club founded in 1913 whose record has nothing to do with the town's postwar rebuilding.

What ties the two together is only the place itself: a small gulf town, destroyed and remade, that carries a nineteenth-century food and a twentieth-century sporting dynasty as its two claims to notice.

What to see in Recco

• Santuario di Nostra Signora del Suffragio. The campanile rebuilt on the site of the main church lost to the bombings is the tallest postwar bell tower in Liguria.
• Golfo Paradiso seafront. Small inlet between Sori and Camogli, with the Bandiera Blu beach and a short lungomare looking south to the Portofino peninsula.
• Ponte di Recco. The rebuilt railway viaduct stands on the site of the structure that drew the wartime bombings, and remains the spine of the modern town.

How to get to Recco

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Genova is roughly 25 minutes away by road.

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Loano

Why visit Loano

Loano lies sixty kilometers southwest of Genova, at the foot of the arc of mountains that shelters it from inland weather. The town was an imperial fief of the Doria family from the thirteenth century, and the family financed the major public buildings still in use today: the palace at the centro's heart, the loggia beside it where civic business was once conducted, and, indirectly, the church that stands nearer the harbor, built for the town's seafarers and still holding their votive offerings of brigantines and barques.

The old centro, with its palace, loggia and church, sits inland of the modern marina and the two kilometers of beach that run east from it. The mountain at Loano's back and the harbor at its front mark the two poles the town has always worked between: the Doria who governed from the hill and the sailors who prayed by the water.

What to see in Loano

• Palazzo Doria. Considered one of the most representative civil Renaissance palaces in Liguria, its rooms now house the town's administrative offices, and the mosaic floor remains open to view on the main level.
• Chiesa di Sant'Agostino. Founded 1582 by Zenobia Del Carretto, rebuilt 1588-98; called the Madonnetta, the seafarers' church, with votive ship models inside.
• Marina di Loano. The Yachting Pages ranking sits alongside a working harbor east of the centro, with the beach running two kilometers of sand and gravel toward it.

How to get to Loano

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Genova is roughly 76 minutes away by road.

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Finale Ligure

Why visit Finale Ligure

Finale Ligure spans three boroughs and the slope above them: Finalmarina and Finalpia on the coast, the walled inland borough set back at the junction of the Aquila and Pora streams. The two coastal quarters face the water and carry the beachfront trade; the inland borough, built as the seat of the marquisate under the Del Carretto from the late twelfth century onward, kept the family's fortifications and its street plan intact behind the walls rather than along the shore.

The stronghold above the borgo passed through building, wartime destruction, and rebuilding before the Genoese conquest left it largely dismantled in 1715, and the Spanish fort on the ridge above continued to ring the town after that conquest was complete. The coastal stretch below carries the Bandiera Blu and now serves as the starting point for the karst climbing and mountain-biking circuit that has drawn outdoor sport to Finale since the 1990s.

The arrangement is a working division rather than a coincidence: the fortified marquisate seat set inland and upslope, the modern leisure economy running along the water below it.

The re-enactment here is Viaggio nel Medioevo, usually held in August.

What to see in Finale Ligure

• Castel Gavone. Del Carretto stronghold built by Enrico II in 1181, destroyed in the wars with Genoa, rebuilt in 1451-52 and dismantled by the Genoese in 1715, leaving the diamond-faceted Torre dei Diamanti standing.
• Castel San Giovanni. Seventeenth-century Spanish fort on a higher ridge above Finalborgo, still ringing the walled town.
• Finalborgo. Walled medieval borough at the junction of the Aquila and Pora streams, listed among the Borghi più belli d'Italia.

How to get to Finale Ligure

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Genova is roughly 71 minutes away by road.

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Lavagna

Why visit Lavagna

Lavagna sits at sea level on the eastern Tigullio, thirty-five kilometers southeast of Genova. The slate quarried from the San Giacomo mountains behind the town roofed the Genovese palazzi and lined the schoolrooms of half of Italy, which is why the Italian word for chalkboard is also lavagna.

Around the year 1000 the Counts of Lavagna held this territory, and the family that descended from them, the Fieschi, rose from it to produce two popes. The frazione of San Salvatore sits above the main town, holding the basilica that one of those popes ordered built in bands of white marble and slate.

Down at sea level, the old center folds around the staircase and square where, on 14 August, the town reenacts a thirteenth-century wedding with the Torta dei Fieschi, a giant cake carried out to the crowd. The beach holds Bandiera Blu at the opposite edge of town, near the port.

A town built on a stone that traveled far beyond it, and on a family that did the same.

What to see in Lavagna

• Basilica di Santo Stefano. Parish church rebuilt over a sixth-century foundation, crowning the main square at the top of a wide staircase where the annual cake pageant begins its procession.
• Basilica di San Salvatore dei Fieschi. Thirteenth-century basilica in the frazione of San Salvatore, ordered by Pope Innocent IV in 1244, façade in alternating bands of white marble and local slate.
• Spiaggia di Lavagna. Long Bandiera Blu beach on the Tigullio, with one of the largest tourist ports in northern Italy at the western end.

How to get to Lavagna

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Genova is roughly 44 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Lavagna