History of Liguria Italy - Travel Guide & Information

This description page of Liguria, will guide you in planning your trip to Italy and help you to find useful travel information about the history of this Italian Region.

After the first Punic War, when the ancient Ligurians split up between Carthage’s allies and Rome’s allies, and especially after the Roman conquer of the region, the so-called X regio, named Liguria, was created at the epoch of Emperor Augustus, stretching from the coast to the banks of Po River. The great Roman roads helped to strengthen the unity and economy of the area through trade. Important towns developed on the coast.

Between the 11th and 13th century the area was split into feuds, but with the strengthening of the bishops’ power, the feudal structure weakened. The main Ligurian towns, especially on the coast, became city-states, ruled by Genoa, and would begin to experience an extraordinary political and commercial rise resulting from spice trades with the Orient.  It was the most powerful maritime republic in the Mediterranean from the 12th to the 14th century.

During the Middle Ages, Genoa gradually gained control of most of Liguria, which shared most of the cit's history and, with a few breaks in the 15th and early 16th century when the area was under either Milanese or French control, the Republic of Genoa ruled  until 1796, when the French Revolutionary general Napoleon Bonaparte reorganized the area into the Ligurian Republic. The Ligurian Republic proved short-lived, however, and was annexed directly by France in 1805.  Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the area was annexed by the Kingdom of Sardinia.

The alternation of French and Milanese dominions over Liguria went on until the first half of the 16th century when Andrea Doria became the prestigious ally of the powerful king of Spain and imposed an aristocratic government, which gave the republic a relative stability for about 250 years.

Liguria was annexed to the French empire (1805) and divided by Napoleon into three departments: Montenotte, with capital Savona, Genoa and the department of the Apennines, with capital Chiavari. After a brief period of independence the Congress of Vienna decided that Liguria should be annexed to the kingdom of Sardinia. The Genoese rose up against the House of Savoy in 1821 in a spirit of nationalism and resistance.  The region’s economic growth flourished. During the tragic period of World War Two Liguria experienced hunger and two years of occupation by the German troops.

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