Without a car
Liguria by train
30 towns
Towns in this region where we confirmed an active station. Check the timetable before you go: a station on the map is not the same as a useful service.
The towns
Andora
Province: Savona · 10 m
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.
Arenzano
Province: Genova · 12 m
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.
Bogliasco
Province: Genova · 5 m
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.
Borgio Verezzi
Province: Savona · 30 m
Two villages joined under one comune in 1933: Borgio on the coast below, Verezzi on the pink-stone hill above.
- Written about. No. 24.
Camogli
Province: Genova · 32 m
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.
Campo Ligure
Province: Genova · 342 m
A Spinola borgo at 342 meters in the Stura valley north of Genova, the last working center for gold and silver filigree in Italy.
Celle Ligure
Province: Savona · 5 m
A Riviera di Ponente beach town with kilns firing since the 1600s.
- Written about. No. 25.
Chiavari
Province: Genova · 3 m
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.
Deiva Marina
Province: La Spezia · 12 m
A Riviera di Levante seaside commune reachable by sea only after the 1874 railway.
Diano
Province: Imperia · 70 m
A twin destination on the Riviera dei Fiori: a medieval hilltop borgo above and a beach resort below, sharing one bay and one olive valley.
Finale Ligure
Province: Savona · 12 m
Three boroughs on the Gulf of Genoa, a walled inland seat set back from two coastal quarters below a karst limestone circuit.
Framura
Province: La Spezia · 76 m
Five hamlets between sea level and 300 meters on the Riviera di Levante, with Byzantine watchtowers built against Saracen incursions.
Laigueglia
Province: Savona · 6 m
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.
Lavagna
Province: Genova · 6 m
The Tigullio town that gave its name to slate, and its counts to a line of popes.
Levanto
Province: La Spezia · 5 m
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.
Loano
Province: Savona · 13 m
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.
Moneglia
Province: Genova · 4 m
A bay on the Riviera di Levante, closed by two wooded headlands.
- Written about. No. 54.
Monterosso al Mare
Province: La Spezia · 12 m
The westernmost and largest of the five villages, where Eugenio Montale spent the childhood summers that became Ossi di seppia in 1925.
Pietra Ligure
Province: Savona · 4 m
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.
- Written about. No. 27.
Rapallo
Province: Genova · 3 m
The largest town on the Tigullio gulf, twice the location of treaties that redrew borders in postwar Europe.
Recco
Province: Genova · 5 m
A coastal town rebuilt from 90 percent destruction in 1943, known for IGP cheese focaccia and Pro Recco water polo.
- Written about. No. 55.
Riomaggiore
Province: La Spezia · 35 m
The easternmost of the five villages, 1,287 people stacked above a fishing inlet, terraced vineyards climbing 250 meters straight off the sea.
Sanremo
Province: Imperia · 10 m
The capital of the Italian Riviera dei Fiori: Belle Époque casino and palm-lined Lungomare on the seafront, a medieval labyrinth climbing the hill behind, and a year-round mild climate that built the original Northern European winter trade.
Santa Margherita Ligure
Province: Genova · 13 m
The Tigullio town that kept its fishing port while the world drove past on the way to Portofino two kilometers further.
- Written about. No. 20.
Sarzana
Province: La Spezia · 21 m
The unofficial capital of the Lunigiana on the Magra plain, birthplace of Pope Niccolò V.
Savona
Province: Savona · 4 m
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. 28.
Sestri Levante
Province: Genova · 10 m
The Tigullio town of two bays, split by a peninsula where a river once silted an island to the shore.
Taggia
Province: Imperia · 40 m
The Argentina valley's medieval seat above the Riviera dei Fiori, the town that gave its name to the Taggiasca olive grown across western Liguria.
Varazze
Province: Savona · 10 m
A Ligurian shipbuilding town whose thirteenth-century friar compiled the saint lives that became the most copied book in Europe after the Bible.
- Written about. No. 56.
Vernazza
Province: La Spezia · 3 m
The middle village of the coast, the only one with a natural harbor, buried under four meters of mud in October 2011.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns
Visso
Province: Macerata
The northern Sibillini gate at 607 meters where the Nera meets the Ussita, holding one of two surviving manuscripts of Leopardi's L'Infinito.
Ofena
Province: L'Aquila
A 531-meter Vestian basin called the Forno d'Abruzzo, where Montepulciano ripens on what may be the oldest of its slopes.
Noto
Province: Siracusa
The capital of Sicilian Baroque, rebuilt entirely in golden limestone after 1693.
Susa
Province: Torino
The Roman gateway at 503 meters, seat of the Cozii under Augustus and Cottius.
Palau
Province: Gallura Nord-Est Sardegna
The Gallura port with a weather-shaped granite bear on the headland that gave the town its emblem.