Description
Porta Soprana is Genoa's medieval gate: two tall crenellated towers flanking a great arch, at the top of the Sant'Andrea hill. It was the city's eastern entrance and today marks the passage between the old town and modern Genoa.
It was built from 1155 onwards with the Barbarossa walls, raised in a hurry to defend the city against the emperor's ambitions. The name comes from Superana: the gate stood higher than the rest of the city.
An opening at this spot already existed in the older circuit of walls, from the ninth to tenth century, on the road to Rome. Together with Porta dei Vacca, it is one of the few medieval gates of Genoa to have survived to the present day.
The detail to look for is the two Latin inscriptions on the inner sides of the arch. Genoa itself speaks, in verses full of rhymes: “I am defended by men, surrounded by magnificent walls, and by my valour I drive the enemy's arrows far away.”
Then comes the warning to the stranger: “If you bring peace, you may touch these gates; if you seek war, you will withdraw unhappy and defeated.” The play on words is deliberate: Genoa's medieval name, Ianua, means precisely gate in Latin.
The second inscription lists the victories over the Saracens, from Africa to Spain, with the conquest of Almería and Tortosa, and closes with the names of the consuls in office in 1155, the year the new walls were begun.
You can visit the towers, together with the nearby Columbus House, now a house museum. Beside the gate also stand the arches of the Cloister of Sant'Andrea, the only remnant of a convent demolished in 1904 to open Via Dante.
Much of what you see today is a reconstruction. From the fourteenth century, its defensive role lost, the gate was swallowed up by the houses of the Ponticello quarter, and a dwelling was built on top of the arch.
In those rooms, in the nineteenth century, lived the son of Sanson, the executioner who had guillotined Louis XVI. In the same century the towers became a prison, with quarters for the jailers.
It was the architect Alfredo d'Andrade, around the turn of the twentieth century, who restored it to the appearance it must have had in the twelfth century, with the battlements and the eagles on the capitals. The southern tower remained enclosed in a building until the 1930s, when Ponticello was demolished.
It was built from 1155 onwards with the Barbarossa walls, raised in a hurry to defend the city against the emperor's ambitions. The name comes from Superana: the gate stood higher than the rest of the city.
An opening at this spot already existed in the older circuit of walls, from the ninth to tenth century, on the road to Rome. Together with Porta dei Vacca, it is one of the few medieval gates of Genoa to have survived to the present day.
The detail to look for is the two Latin inscriptions on the inner sides of the arch. Genoa itself speaks, in verses full of rhymes: “I am defended by men, surrounded by magnificent walls, and by my valour I drive the enemy's arrows far away.”
Then comes the warning to the stranger: “If you bring peace, you may touch these gates; if you seek war, you will withdraw unhappy and defeated.” The play on words is deliberate: Genoa's medieval name, Ianua, means precisely gate in Latin.
The second inscription lists the victories over the Saracens, from Africa to Spain, with the conquest of Almería and Tortosa, and closes with the names of the consuls in office in 1155, the year the new walls were begun.
You can visit the towers, together with the nearby Columbus House, now a house museum. Beside the gate also stand the arches of the Cloister of Sant'Andrea, the only remnant of a convent demolished in 1904 to open Via Dante.
Much of what you see today is a reconstruction. From the fourteenth century, its defensive role lost, the gate was swallowed up by the houses of the Ponticello quarter, and a dwelling was built on top of the arch.
In those rooms, in the nineteenth century, lived the son of Sanson, the executioner who had guillotined Louis XVI. In the same century the towers became a prison, with quarters for the jailers.
It was the architect Alfredo d'Andrade, around the turn of the twentieth century, who restored it to the appearance it must have had in the twelfth century, with the battlements and the eagles on the capitals. The southern tower remained enclosed in a building until the 1930s, when Ponticello was demolished.