Morfasso

Morfasso lies in a basin of the upper Arda valley, closed in by mountains. The name, some say, comes from the Latin moram facere, to halt, and would point to a military camp pitched here during the very long Roman war to subdue the Ligurians; others hold it to be Lombard. Lombard for certain is the monastery of Santi Salvatore e Gallo of Val Tolla, founded in the seventh century, which governed the whole upper valley for centuries: it lost its administrative role in 1220, when the bishop handed that jurisdiction to the commune of Piacenza, and ended altogether in 1624, when cardinal Francesco Barberini had its archives, diplomas and papal privileges carried off to Rome. A monastery can be suppressed simply by taking away its papers.

On 24 May 1944 the thirty-eighth Garibaldi Brigade liberated the village, and Morfasso is remembered as the first comune in Italy freed above the Gothic Line. It did not last: the Germans came back with the winter round-up, and on 4 December of that year, in the hamlet of Guselli, twenty-five partisans were killed and ten more captured; the final liberation came the following spring. The rest of the twentieth century is the story of a departure: emigration, above all to England, has been such that today more people from Morfasso are on the register of residents abroad than live in the village.