Day trips
Day trips from Genoa
38 towns within 90 minutes
Closest first. Bogliasco is 16 minutes out. Drive times are computed on real roads, so they are a fair estimate rather than a promise about traffic.
The towns
Bogliasco
Province: Genova · 5 m
16 minutes from Genoa. A fishing village on the Riviera di Levante just east of Genoa, built around a 13th-century stone bridge over the Bogliasco torrent and a tight grid of pastel-coloured houses opening onto a pebble cove.
Recco
Province: Genova · 5 m
25 minutes from Genoa. A coastal town rebuilt from 90 percent destruction in 1943, known for IGP cheese focaccia and Pro Recco water polo.
- Written about. No. 27.
Rapallo
Province: Genova · 3 m
30 minutes from Genoa. The largest town on the Tigullio gulf, twice the location of treaties that redrew borders in postwar Europe.
Arenzano
Province: Genova · 12 m
31 minutes from Genoa. A coastal town twenty kilometers west of Genova where two-thirds of the territory climbs into the Parco del Beigua and peaks above a thousand meters.
- Written about. No. 25.
Chiavari
Province: Genova · 3 m
32 minutes from Genoa. The Tigullio capital between Portofino and the Cinque Terre, a 27,000-person Genoese trading town built around a thirteenth-century grid of porticoed streets.
- Written about. No. 24.
Camogli
Province: Genova · 32 m
33 minutes from Genoa. A fishing village on the Golfo Paradiso whose nineteenth-century fleet of a thousand white sails made it Italy's third maritime power in the Mediterranean.
- Written about. No. 26.
Portofino
Province: Genova · 3 m
39 minutes from Genoa. Three hundred and fifty-one residents, the smallest municipal territory in the metropolitan area, and the harbor every superyacht in the Mediterranean wants to anchor in.
Celle Ligure
Province: Savona · 5 m
40 minutes from Genoa. A Riviera di Ponente beach town with kilns firing since the 1600s.
Santa Margherita Ligure
Province: Genova · 13 m
40 minutes from Genoa. The Tigullio town that kept its fishing port while the world drove past on the way to Portofino two kilometers further.
Campo Ligure
Province: Genova · 342 m
41 minutes from Genoa. A Spinola borgo at 342 meters in the Stura valley north of Genova, the last working center for gold and silver filigree in Italy.
Lavagna
Province: Genova · 6 m
44 minutes from Genoa. The Tigullio town that gave its name to slate, and its counts to a line of popes.
- Written about. No. 28.
Sestri Levante
Province: Genova · 10 m
44 minutes from Genoa. The Tigullio town of two bays, split by a peninsula where a river once silted an island to the shore.
Varazze
Province: Savona · 10 m
45 minutes from Genoa. A Ligurian shipbuilding town whose thirteenth-century friar compiled the saint lives that became the most copied book in Europe after the Bible.
Deiva Marina
Province: La Spezia · 12 m
50 minutes from Genoa. A Riviera di Levante seaside commune reachable by sea only after the 1874 railway.
Moneglia
Province: Genova · 4 m
57 minutes from Genoa. A bay on the Riviera di Levante, closed by two wooded headlands.
Noli
Province: Savona · 4 m
58 minutes from Genoa. The fifth Italian maritime republic from 1192 to 1797, a walled coastal town with the Romanesque basilica of San Paragorio outside its gates.
Framura
Province: La Spezia · 76 m
59 minutes from Genoa. Five hamlets between sea level and 300 meters on the Riviera di Levante, with Byzantine watchtowers built against Saracen incursions.
Savona
Province: Savona · 4 m
59 minutes from Genoa. A working port city with two Della Rovere popes, a Sistine Chapel of its own, and a fortress on the old town.
- Written about. No. 57.
Brugnato
Province: La Spezia · 115 m
62 minutes from Genoa. The medieval ecclesiastical capital of an inland Ligurian valley, seat of a diocese from 1133 to 1820, with a co-cathedral built over a Columban monastery.
Pietra Ligure
Province: Savona · 4 m
67 minutes from Genoa. A Riviera di Ponente town named after the rock castle above its center, known today for one of the largest triennial flower carpets in Europe.
Borgio Verezzi
Province: Savona · 30 m
69 minutes from Genoa. Two villages joined under one comune in 1933: Borgio on the coast below, Verezzi on the pink-stone hill above.
Varese Ligure
Province: La Spezia · 358 m
70 minutes from Genoa. The Val di Vara's medieval seat at 358 meters, the first European municipality with ISO 14001 certification, anchor of Italy's largest organic district.
Finale Ligure
Province: Savona · 12 m
71 minutes from Genoa. Three boroughs on the Gulf of Genoa, a walled inland seat set back from two coastal quarters below a karst limestone circuit.
Levanto
Province: La Spezia · 5 m
72 minutes from Genoa. The sixth Cinque Terre, a beach town and Cittaslow at the gateway of the national park, with a surf break and a striped Gothic church.
Sassello
Province: Savona · 381 m
72 minutes from Genoa. A baroque borgo at 381 meters in the Parco del Beigua, split by a stream and known for a soft almond biscuit invented in its own kitchens.
Millesimo
Province: Savona · 429 m
73 minutes from Genoa. A fortified borgo at 429 meters, where Napoleon broke the Austro-Sardinian army in April 1796.
Toirano
Province: Savona · 35 m
74 minutes from Genoa. A medieval village at the mouth of the Val Varatella, four kilometers inland from Loano, with karst caves holding 14,000-year-old human footprints.
Loano
Province: Savona · 13 m
76 minutes from Genoa. A Doria fief on the Savona coast where a Renaissance palace stands over a Roman mosaic, in the shadow of the mountain that shelters it.
- Written about. No. 54.
Monterosso al Mare
Province: La Spezia · 12 m
78 minutes from Genoa. The westernmost and largest of the five villages, where Eugenio Montale spent the childhood summers that became Ossi di seppia in 1925.
Santo Stefano d'Aveto
Province: Genova · 1,012 m
81 minutes from Genoa. Liguria's highest commune, set in the Ligurian-Emilian Apennines with a Malaspina-Doria castle and the region's only ski resort.
- Written about. No. 20.
Sarzana
Province: La Spezia · 21 m
82 minutes from Genoa. The unofficial capital of the Lunigiana on the Magra plain, birthplace of Pope Niccolò V.
Zuccarello
Province: Savona · 130 m
82 minutes from Genoa. A 279-person medieval borgo in the Neva valley above Albenga, founded by the Marquises of Clavesana in 1248, birthplace of Ilaria del Carretto.
Andora
Province: Savona · 10 m
83 minutes from Genoa. A Riviera town with two faces, two kilometers of sandy beach on the Aurelia and a ruined twelfth-century castle hidden on a hill behind it.
Laigueglia
Province: Savona · 6 m
85 minutes from Genoa. A former coral-fishing village on the Riviera di Ponente, with a curved Baroque parish church and a fishermen's grid of caruggi behind the beach.
- Written about. No. 18.
Ameglia
Province: La Spezia · 89 m
89 minutes from Genoa. A hilltop borgo at 89 meters above the mouth of the Magra, the Lunigiana edge of Liguria where the river meets the Gulf of Poets.
- Written about. No. 19.
Castelnuovo Magra
Province: La Spezia · 188 m
89 minutes from Genoa. A ridge village on the Liguria-Tuscany border where a marquisate treaty ended decades of conflict with the bishops of Luni.
Cervo
Province: Imperia · 66 m
89 minutes from Genoa. A hilltop village on the Riviera di Ponente built by coral fishermen, named for the Roman mansio on the Via Julia Augusta.
- Written about. No. 17.
Lerici
Province: La Spezia · 10 m
90 minutes from Genoa. A fishing harbor under a Pisan-Genoese castle, with the frazione of Tellaro hanging over the rocks at the commune's southern edge.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns
Castrocaro Terme e Terra del Sole
Province: Forlì-Cesena
A pairing of two towns: a ninth-century fortress on a hill and Cosimo I de' Medici's planned Renaissance garrison town on the plain below, founded 1564.
Guardialfiera
Province: Campobasso
A hilltop village at 285 meters above the largest artificial lake in Molise.
Levico Terme
Province: Trento
A Habsburg spa town in the Valsugana at 520 meters, built on arsenic-iron thermal waters.
Capriate San Gervasio
Province: Bergamo
The Bergamasco town that holds Crespi d'Adda, the late-nineteenth-century company village inscribed by UNESCO in 1995 as a model workers' settlement.
Greccio
Province: Rieti
A 705-meter borgo on a ridge above the Rieti valley, built around the cave of the first living nativity scene.