Porta Soprana

Gate Genoa, Italy

Genoa’s Porta Soprana (also known as Porta Sant’Andrea) is one of the many openings in the extensive city walls, and has come to be one of the symbols of the proud Maritime Republic – whose seven centuries of freedom (1096-1815) can be summed up in a string of traditional epithets like “The Proud”, “The Mistress of the Seas”, and “The Republic of the Magnificent”. The monumental Porta Soprana is one of the few surviving gates remaining from the so-called “Barbarossa walls”, built between 1155 and 1159 and named after the Swabian Emperor who, during his Second Italian Campaign in 1158, captured Milan and demanded taxes from Genoa