There’s a particular Sunday morning, one where you wake up and want neither the sea nor the crowds. You want silence, fresh air, something you haven’t yet seen. Outside your window the sky is that luminous grey typical of Liguria when it hasn’t yet decided what to do with the day, but you have already decided: it’s time to head inland.
It takes just over forty minutes from Genoa to find yourself in a world that seems to have a different rhythm, a different building material, a different color. Just one color, really: black. The glossy black, almost blue, of slate.
Val Fontanabuona is one of those valleys that never makes it onto the covers of travel guides, yet it created something that almost everyone born before the 1990s has held in their hands at least once: the school blackboard. That black, smooth one that squeaked under chalk. It came from here. It came from these mountains, from these hands, from these villages built with the same stone they extracted every day.
The stone that wrote the world’s history
The slate of Val Fontanabuona is a metamorphic rock that divides into thin slabs with an almost geometric precision, as if the mountain were already thinking about its final destination. For centuries, perhaps millennia, the inhabitants of this valley learned to work it: first for roofs, then for floors, then for tombstones, then—and here lies the extraordinary story—for school slates that reached every corner of Europe and the Americas.
Discover Boasi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Walking along the paths of the valley means constantly encountering this stone. The walls of farmhouses use it as brick. The roofs overlap it in dark scales that shine after the rain. The bridges rest it on the beds of streams. The cemeteries carve it into crosses and angels. There is something coherent and almost moving about a territory that built everything with what lay beneath its feet.
«Liguria is a land where stone is never just stone: it is memory, labor, identity.»
— Renzo Piano, in various interviews about the relationship between architecture and Ligurian territory
Some quarries in the valley are still active, though in much smaller numbers than in the past. Some of them can be visited, accompanied by local guides who explain the extraction and processing techniques. Watching a stonecutter open a slate slab along its natural lines is one of those artisanal gestures that seems like magic until you understand the logic: the rock wants to divide, you just need to find the right plane.
Borzonasca and Lumarzo: two villages, one stone
Borzonasca is located in the upper part of the valley, where the Sturla stream begins to lose strength and the vegetation becomes denser. It is a village that reveals itself slowly: the houses are built in dark slate, the alleys are narrow and slightly sloped, and every now and then a small square opens up with a fountain that gurgles without hurry. There isn’t much to do in Borzonasca in the tourist sense of the term, and that is precisely its merit.
Davide Papalini, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
The town has a parish church that deserves a stop: the interior preserves well-crafted wooden works and that intimate atmosphere found only in mountain churches, where light enters obliquely and silence has a substance of its own. In the surrounding area, the territory offers well-marked trails that lead toward the Apennine ridges, with views that on clear days reach all the way to the sea.
Lumarzo, closer to Genoa and accessible without having to travel through the entire valley, is another example of slate architecture taken to its logical conclusion. Here the material is not merely constructive but almost philosophical: every available surface seems to be covered with that black stone, and on certain cloudy afternoons the village almost blends in with the sky. In spring, when the chestnut and hazel trees leaf out, the contrast between the tender green of the vegetation and the shiny black of the roofs is of an almost unreal beauty.
Trekking: walking through the inland without effort
One of the most interesting aspects of Val Fontanabuona for those who love walking is that the trails are, in most cases, suitable for everyone. We’re not talking about high mountains or challenging elevation gains: we’re talking about routes that follow the valley floor, gently climb towards the ridges, cross chestnut forests and connect villages just a few kilometers apart from one another.
Photo by Lorenza Magnaghi on Pexels
The trail that connects some of the slate villages — passing through stretches of forest, crossing streams on stone bridges and skirting abandoned ancient quarries — is one of the most rewarding walks in the Genoa inland for those seeking something more than a simple stroll but don’t want to tackle a challenging trek. The signs of the Ligurian trail network (CAI and local trails) are generally reliable, but it’s always advisable to download a GPS track before setting out.
Spring is absolutely the best season. From April to June the valley is lush in an almost excessive way, the streams are in flood, wildflowers border the trails and the temperature is just right for walking without sweating and without freezing. Summer brings heat and a few more tourists, but the valley is never as crowded as the coast. Autumn has its own particular magic: the chestnut trees turn gold, the air smells of mushrooms and damp earth, and the abandoned quarries take on an even more evocative appearance in the low light of October.
«Ö mâ o l’è lontan, ma o se sente sempre.»
— Ligurian popular saying: “The sea is far away, but you can always feel it.” — a proverb documented in Ligurian oral tradition, which reminds us how even in the inland the seafaring identity never disappears completely.
For those who want to add a cultural element to their walk, it’s worth seeking out one of the slate artisans still active in the area. There are few, but they exist, and some open their workshops by booking. Seeing how the stone is worked — how it’s cut, polished, engraved — is an experience that changes the way you look at every roof, every floor, every gravestone in Liguria.
How to get to Val Fontanabuona from Genoa
Val Fontanabuona is not directly served by train, which means that a car is the most convenient means of transportation. From Genoa you take the A7 motorway towards Milan and exit at Ronco Scrivia, or you can take the state road that goes up the Val Bisagno and then bends east through the Passo della Scoffera. This latter option, longer in terms of kilometers, is however spectacular: the Passo della Scoffera is one of those Apennine passes that reminds you how thin the line is between the sea and the mountains in Liguria.
Travel times from Genoa vary between forty minutes and an hour, depending on which part of the valley you want to reach. For Lumarzo you’re closer, for Borzonasca you arrive in about an hour. It’s not a challenging distance for a Sunday outing.
For those without a car, there is a suburban bus service that connects Genoa with several municipalities in Val Fontanabuona. Frequencies are not those of an urban service, so it’s worth checking schedules in advance on the AMT Genoa website or local Ligurian transport. The bus option, less convenient but possible, still allows you to reach the valley without driving, with the advantage of being able to watch the landscape instead of focusing on the road.
How to organize your day: a possible itinerary
Leaving Genoa around nine in the morning sets the right pace. You arrive in the valley when the light is still fresh and the villages haven’t quite woken up yet. A first stop in Lumarzo allows for a short walk through the historic center and a close-up look at the slate architecture: the roofs, walls, doorways, and stone slabs that pave the narrow streets.
Then you head up towards Borzonasca, where you can take one of the marked trails leading to the quarries or surrounding forests. A two to three-hour walk, with moderate elevation gain, is enough to enjoy the landscape without arriving exhausted at lunchtime.
Lunch in Val Fontanabuona is a serious matter. Local restaurants and trattorias offer authentic Ligurian inland cuisine: homemade pesto pasta, testaroli, porcini mushrooms (in season), rabbit Ligurian style, goat cheese from the Apennine pastures. Don’t expect grand restaurants with creative menus: expect honest cooking, generous portions, and local wine that makes no pretense of grandeur but pairs perfectly with everything.
The afternoon is the right time to visit, if available, a slate craftsman’s workshop or take a shorter second walk towards an abandoned quarry. Disused quarries have a particular charm: walls of black rock cut vertically, rusty machinery, stone slabs left in precarious balance. These are not places equipped for tourism, so it’s best to approach with caution and respect.
Your return to Genoa in the late afternoon closes the day in the best way: you come back with shoes covered in red earth, a few photos of black roofs against the sky, and the clear sense of having seen something that most tourists never see.
The detail that makes the trip worthwhile
There’s one thing that guidebooks never mention about Val Fontanabuona, and it alone is worth the trip: the slate board you used at school might have come from here. Not metaphorically, not approximately. Literally. The quarries of Val Fontanabuona supplied schoolroom slate boards for decades to schools throughout Europe and the Americas. Every generation of children who learned to read and write on that smooth black surface held a piece of this mountain in their hands.
Luigi Chiesa, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Thinking about this while walking among the abandoned quarries completely changes your perspective. These walls of black rock are not just a landscape: they are the physical memory of millions of first words written, equations erased with a sponge, drawings made in secret during history class. There’s something moving about this connection between such a small, quiet place and the entire world, and no travel guide can capture it better than simply standing still for a moment in front of a quarry and letting the thought come on its own.
If Val Fontanabuona has convinced you — and we’re quite sure it will — the properties on genovabb.it are the perfect base to depart from each morning and return to each evening. Genoa is forty minutes away, but feels like another world: the city, the port, the caruggi, the sea. Then the next morning you set out again, towards another valley, another village, another piece of Liguria waiting to be discovered. You can explore all the ideas for your excursions on our portal, or go directly to choose your property and start planning.
