The Hill Behind the Beach

I came to Liguria to lie on a beach. It turns out I am not very good at that.

And it is a good beach — that is the problem. The sea is warm, the town behind it is painted ochre and faded pink, the coffee is correct, and by the second afternoon I had stopped reading my book and started reading the hills instead. There is a ridge behind Savona, wooded the whole way up, and near the top of it one long flat line that hills do not do on their own.

So I went up. The road climbs through pines and ends at a gate: two masonry piers, a chain slung between them, tags on both, a gravel track going in under the trees. Nothing about it is sealed and nothing about it is looked after. It has simply stopped being anybody’s problem.

It is one fort — the Forte della Madonna degli Angeli — but it does not read as one thing. The lower level is old work: brick arches and cut stone, a row of vaults opening onto a dirt yard, ivy pouring over the top of each one and hanging down inside like a curtain nobody draws. Then the crown of the hill is concrete, poured straight over the back of it — ramparts, wells, magazine mouths, a whole gun battery grafted onto something that was already finished. Somebody kept deciding this hill still mattered, and kept rebuilding it for a different war.

The roof

You can walk all of it, and I did, twice. It is acres — a deck cracked into plates the size of cars, grass and small pines working the seams, every flat surface tagged in blue and pink going back years. Set into it, in circular wells, are the armoured cupolas: riveted steel drums gone brown under the paint, vents around the collar, one still carrying the steel frame it was lifted with. Underneath them, black.

And the whole time, off to one side, the sea. Savona’s port with its cranes, a ship standing off it, one headland after another going blue down the coast, and inland the mountains turning gold. I got up there with an hour of light left and spent all of it walking around on top of a gun battery.

The labyrinth is in the hill itself. Step in off the deck and it goes quiet and several degrees colder — vaulted galleries, pale plaster still holding on in patches, doorways lining up inside doorways until the last one is a grey postage stamp of light. In one room the floor plates have been lifted and stacked rusting along the edge, and the channel they were covering runs the length of it with black water standing in the bottom. I came to a barred gate with daylight on the far side and could not have told you which way I was facing.

I was on the beach, and it wasn’t enough. That is the entire reason I found this place.

There is a twin of it further along the ridge, doing the same job from a different summit. I didn’t walk over to it. I already had what I came up for.

I came back down as the town was switching on below, and made it to dinner by the water. The beach is fine. The beach was never the point.