Surfing Varazze: the wave born from a motorway site

Varazze's story starts with a construction accident. In the 1970s, work on the motorway running along the Ligurian Riviera dumped fill and tunnel-boring spoil near the mouth of the Teiro torrent, right next to the Molo Marinai d'Italia jetty. The resulting rocky seabed started breaking swell almost like a real coral reef.

Nobody engineered that bathymetry for surfing, it's the byproduct of a public works project. Yet the result became one of Italy's most respected waves, recognised as early as 1983 as one of the three best waves in the entire Mediterranean.

Varazze is an A-frame breaking right in front of the jetty: a fast, hollow left that runs toward the rocks, and a longer, more relaxed right with a softer section near the end. It needs a S to SW swell and holds up to 4 metres on the right, often barrelling at its best.

Winter remains the reference season, October through March, with December and January as the most consistent months. In summer, by contrast, the Mediterranean flattens out and Varazze goes back to being a quiet pebble beach.

The title is more than a tourist-guide line. The Varazze Surf Club, working with the Liguria Surfing Division, has been running lessons there since the late 1990s, and the spot remains one of the few in Italy combining consistency, wave quality and easy access from Genoa or Milan, under two hours' drive away.

That proximity to northern Italy's big cities explains the crowd that shows up the moment a forecast promises swell on Liguria. It's also what has kept the local scene alive, with competitions and schools running for more than forty years.

On 27 August 2014, at exactly 10pm, Varazze became one of the very first spots in the world fitted for night surfing. A lighting system was installed on the jetty, an initiative led by the then vice-mayor, Filippo Piacentini, a surfer himself, with help from the company running the local lighthouse and the port's harbour master's office.

The idea behind the project: make use of the swell that arrives after sunset instead of watching it from the sand. Worldwide, you can count the spots where that's possible on one hand. Varazze remains, to this day, one of the rare examples in Europe.

According to several surf historians, it was in Genoa, a few kilometres from Varazze, that the Australian explorer Peter Troy is said to have ridden the first Italian wave, back in 1963, during a round-the-world hitchhiking trip that took him from the Americas to Asia. The story went nowhere for years, it would take until the late 1970s for a first real generation of local surfers to take shape on this coast.

It was in Bogliasco, a little further east toward Genoa, that the movement truly took root, led in particular by brothers Marco and Alberto Fracas. Varazze, further west, picked up the baton with its accidental wave and turned itself, over the decades, into the region's most developed surf destination.

Aim for October to March for consistency, with a preference for December and January. Pack a full wetsuit, Ligurian Riviera water stays cool for much of the year. Level required: intermediate to advanced, the left that runs toward the rocks doesn't forgive a sloppy line.

Varazze sits in the province of Savona, under two hours' drive from Milan and even less from Genoa, making it an easy weekend session from northern Italy or the south of France.