Ferriere

Ferriere is the largest comune in the province of Piacenza, one hundred and eighty square kilometres between the upper val Nure and the val d'Aveto, and its territory holds three glacial lakes — the Nero, the Bino and the Moo — at different stages of silting up. The name comes from the iron mines, worked by the Romans from the second century before Christ and running at full stretch in the thirteenth century, with two blast furnaces and fourteen hammers, bellows and millraces; the main village, on the other hand, was founded in the fifteenth century as Reate, or Ariate, after the Rieti origins of its feudal lord Tommaso Moroni.

These places are first named in a decree of the Lombard king Rachis, of 747, in which Gambaro appears as a community of free men and Torrio as a holding of the abbey of Bobbio. The comune was created in 1806 under the name of Gambaro, with its seat in the Malaspina castle; it was moved to Ferriere in 1815 and took the new name in 1817. Between the nineteen-tens and the nineteen-twenties the val d'Aveto hamlets asked to be transferred to Santo Stefano d'Aveto, which was easier to reach: the process stalled because the voters' petition, through a transmission error, was never sent. In 2016 the village voted no, by the largest margin of the three comuni, to the merger with Farini and Bettola.