Valloria — Town of the Painted Doors

Valloria is a hamlet in the municipality of Prelà, in the inland area behind Imperia, just a few kilometres from the coast but separated from it by a landscape of olive-planted hills and woodland that belongs to a Liguria long overlooked by seaside tourism. The village stands along the slopes of the Prino valley, in an area where settlements emptied out progressively over the course of the twentieth century, following the same trajectory of abandonment that has marked much of the Ligurian hinterland to the west.

The initiative that gave Valloria back its visibility began in the 1990s, the work of a group of residents and artists who chose to act on the village's built fabric through painting on wood. The principle is simple in form: each door is entrusted to a different artist, who paints it with their own subjects and style, with no imposed theme. Over time, the number of decorated doors has grown past a hundred, and the route connecting them winds through narrow lanes, stone stairways and house façades, some still lived in, others left empty. The artists who have taken part come from many different countries, and this diversity reads directly on the wooden surfaces: painting techniques, cultural references and visual registers sit side by side without mediation, sometimes just metres apart.

What sets Valloria apart from other villages that have followed similar paths is the strictly craft-based nature of the support itself. A painted door here is not a canvas applied to a wall, nor a mural that turns architecture into backdrop: it is an object of everyday use, with hinges, handles, signs of wear, that continues to serve its function while carrying a work of art on its surface. This double status — tool and painted surface at once — keeps the village in a productive state of ambiguity, far from both museum and mere urban decoration.

The surrounding territory cannot be separated from the experience of the place. The inland area behind Imperia preserves a network of paths and mule tracks that historically linked the villages of the interior, and Valloria fits into this system as one of its still-recognisable nodes. The Mediterranean vegetation, the terraced olive groves and the quality of light at certain hours of the day form a setting that is not ornament but geographical substance, an integral part of the reason why some places endure while others disappear altogether.