Porto Maurizio: Giovanni Boine’s town
by Maria Antonella Molinari
A rich town, a coloured town, a shining town, a windy town, a town which is close to the sea. An ancient town. This is how Porto Maurizio appeared and appears to a visitor who comes from the west, and this is how the Ligurian writer Giovanni Boine described it almost a century ago.
If you want to visit the places which remind this writer, you should start with “borgo Parasio”, the most ancient district of Porto Maurizio. If you come from Sanremo, you can get there by Corso Garibaldi, while if you come from Oneglia, by Viale Matteotti. When you arrive at Piazza Marconi, you can go through Corso Saffi: it will take you to “borgo Parasio”. This place is very characteristic because of the typical narrow streets. You can have a look of the sea from the Poor Clares’s Convent or the St. Peter’s Oratory. This ancient district is full of historical memories and palaces where important families were used to live, like Pagliari Palace, in Piazza Pagliari. At the bottom of the hill you can see the Neoclassical style cathedral, built at the end of the XVIIIth century by the architect Gaetano Cantoni. There is also an important naval museum close to the cathedral. If you go through Via Strafforello and Via Carducci, you will get to Via Cascione, the most important street of the town. Then turn right into Via Nizza and at the beginning of Via D’Annunzio you will find other places close to the writer, the Carmelite nuns’s convent and the Capuchin friars’s church, where Boine set some episodes of his novel. Next to this church there is a street which takes you to Monte Calvario. Everything is almost the same as it once was, apart from the convent which was restored and transformed into a nursing home. When you get to the top of Monte Calvario, you will be able to look at the wonderful hills and the sea around you.
(Riproduzione vietata)
