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Fortress

Scola Tower

Italy · 17th century

Founded
c. 1700
Heritage status
Italian national heritage
Location
Porto Venere
Coordinates
44.05174°, 9.85833°
Open on the map →Wikipedia ↗
Scola Tower in Italy
Photo: Alessandro from Milan, Italy · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Description

The Scola Tower - or tower of St. John the Baptist - is a military building located just beyond the northeastern tip (called tip Scola) of Palmaria (island) in Porto Venere, in the Gulf of Poets in the province of La Spezia, Italy. It is part of, along with the Fort Cavour and Umberto I and the Batteria Semaforo, the defensive positions of Palmaria.

As with other coastal towers and lookouts of the Ligurian coast, the Scola Tower is part of a defensive system originally desired by the Senate of the Republic of Genoa in the 16th and 17th centuries for the purposes of protecting the coast and, consequently, the towns and villages. According to some studies, the tower may have been built in the early 17th century for an estimated cost of 56,000 Genoese liras, and was in response to new ballistic technologies which forced the Senate of Genoa to a rapid conversion of existing defensive sites and the creation of new ones.

The tower is pentagonal in shape with an average wall thickness of about 4 metres (13 ft), which accommodates up to eight people (eight soldiers, including a captain and a master "bombardero") and ten cannons, and guards the Bay of Palmaria, Porto Venere and Lerici.

During the Napoleonic Wars, it was at the centre of a naval engagement on 23 January 1800 between the British and French fleets, and was damaged by the British through their efforts to remove the latter from the Gulf of La Spezia, leaving it in a state of total neglect for the first half of the 19th century.

Used for target practice by the Marina Militare and scheduled for demolition in 1915, it was saved by catching the interest of Ubaldo Mazzini, a local official at the Ministry of Education, and it was eventually decided to convert the tower to a lighthouse. Between 1976 and 1980, the structure underwent major restoration and consolidation of the perimeter wall.

Text adapted from “Scola Tower” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In the rankings

Scola Tower ranks #4,789 of 9,040 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #347 of the 555 mapped in Italy. Founded c. 1700, it is older than 21% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 710 atlas entries founded in the 17th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 1,727 times in the last 60 days, more than 66% of the atlas. 2 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. See how Italy compares in the castle statistics.

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