Can you climb the Lanterna, and how do you reach it on foot?

Why it matters

No other building stands for Genoa quite the way this one does. The Lanterna appears on the football badges, the beer labels and the road signs; sailors have steered by it for eight hundred years; and it is the tallest traditional masonry lighthouse in the Mediterranean, seventy-seven meters of tower on a rock that lifts it to a hundred and seventeen meters above the water.

The tower's age is often overstated. A light stood on this rock from the early twelfth century, but the tower seen today was rebuilt in fifteen forty-three, after the earlier one was wrecked in fighting between Genoa and its neighbours, paid for by the Bank of Saint George.

Its shape is unusually legible for a lighthouse: two square towers stacked rather than a single tapering shaft, each with a projecting terrace, the upper one set back from the lower. That silhouette is recognisable in profile from thirty kilometres out at sea, and easy enough to draw that the city has used it as a logo for the better part of a century.

What you can climb, and what stays off limits

The Lanterna is a working light, operated by the navy, and that is why only part of it is available to visitors. The second terrace and the lantern chamber above it are naval property, not available to the public; the climb that visitors can make stops at the first terrace, which is high enough to make the effort worthwhile.

The way up is a masonry stair built inside the wall, one hundred and seventy-two steps to that first terrace. From it the view runs straight down the mole, west over the container port and east over the whole city, stacked up its hillside with the hills and forts behind.

Worth knowing before setting out: the second terrace, the one that appears in nearly every photograph taken from the sea, cannot be visited at all. What the public climbs to is the lower of the two stages, not the upper one.

The walk out to it

Getting there is half the visit. The Lanterna cannot be reached through the port gates, which are controlled, so the way in is a pedestrian walkway of about eight hundred meters running from the ferry terminal, mostly cantilevered outside the old city walls and above the working quays.

It is an unusual piece of city. On one side stands seventeenth-century stone; below, on the other, are the ferries loading for Sardinia and Sicily, the tugs, the containers and the cranes. Few European cities let a visitor walk this close to a working port.

The walkway begins near the ferry terminal, served by city buses and about four hundred meters from Dinegro metro station; Piazza Principe station is roughly a kilometre and a half away. For the wider transit picture, see /getting-around/. The route is exposed, so it is windy in a blow and hot at midday in summer.

The walkway dates from the nineteen-nineties, part of the same effort that rebuilt the waterfront, and it solved a real problem: the tower had been stranded inside the port since the nineteenth century, visible from everywhere and reachable by almost nobody. Halfway along, the path passes the Porta Lanterna, one of the old gates of the seventeenth-century walls, and a short stretch of rampart. The park at the tower's foot is a grassy shelf above the quays, with benches and, on a clear day, a view east over the whole arc of the city.

What you actually see

The tower is severe: two plain square stages with cornices, a spiral of tiny windows, and nothing decorative except the painted arms of the commune high on the lower shaft, first put there in thirteen forty by a painter named Evangelista di Milano and repainted many times since.

At the foot, inside the old fortifications, sits a small museum about the city, the port and the tower itself, with the machinery and optics of earlier lights. It is modest, and the entry comes with the climb.

The rock the tower stands on is no longer at the water's edge. Land reclamation for the port pushed the sea back, so the Lanterna now stands a short distance inland, above the quays rather than in the waves, a change that surprises visitors who know it from old pictures. The tower has been repaired many times over: storm, siege and lightning each did damage, the light itself was modernised with a rotating Fresnel lens in the eighteen-forties, and the building was patched again after the Second World War, when the port around it was bombed heavily.

How to visit

Two hours covers the walk out, the museum and the climb at an unhurried pace, without rushing any part of it.

The schedule is not daily; this is usually a weekend visit, and bad weather can keep both the walkway and the terrace off the itinerary since both are exposed to wind and rain. Confirm the current arrangements with the operator before making the trip, which is not a short one. See /booking-ahead/ for how to plan ahead for sights like this one.

Shoes with grip help on the stair, which is worn smooth in places. No lift serves the climb, and while the walkway itself is level, it is long. The visit combines naturally with /porto-antico/, a walk or one metro stop away, and with /galata/ if a look at the port's history indoors appeals before heading out to the tower.

Honest notes

The Lanterna rewards seeing from a distance as well as up close: from the Bigo at the Porto Antico, from the terraces of /castelletto/, or from a ferry pulling out of the port.

The surroundings are industrial and will stay that way. This is a monument inside a working port, not a monument set in a park, and the cranes and container stacks are part of the view rather than an intrusion on it.