Varazze is a small Ligurian resort town on a broad bay between the headlands of Punta di Mola and Punta dell'Aspera. It has a decent beach, a busy tourist marina with moorings for some 300 boats, and a pleasant historic centre that climbs towards the hills. The Romans established a settlement here — called Ad Navalia for the ships built on this shore — and the shipbuilding tradition persisted into modern times. Behind the town, the slopes of the Beigua mountains are covered with mimosa and maritime pine, broken by cliffs that drop straight to the sea.
The town's most notable monument is the collegiate church of Sant'Ambrogio, dating from 1535 and standing on the square of the same name. Its Romanesque-Gothic campanile, with three tiers of triple-arched windows, survives from a fourteenth-century predecessor and is the finest thing in town. Varazze was the birthplace of Jacobus de Voragine, the thirteenth-century Dominican archbishop who compiled the Golden Legend, one of the most widely read books of the medieval world.