The name says Middle Ages; the history of the town says seventeenth century. The stone bridge that crosses the Scrivia at Ronco was long held by local historians to be medieval, but closer reconstructions assign it to the golden age of the Spinola marquisate, around the middle of the seventeenth century: the same years in which the marquis obtained from Emperor Ferdinand III of Habsburg the right to strike coins at the local mint, and in which the parish church of San Martino, the oratory of San Giacomo and the marquis' palace were built.
What to see
The bridge crosses the Scrivia on four stone arches, close to the main settlement. Crossing here is not a recent idea: the oldest street of the old borgo of Villavecchia is still called via Postumia and is thought to follow, at least in part, the line of the Roman consular road that climbed from Genoa towards Libarna and Aquileia. At this point the torrent draws a double bend, and the alluvial plain on which the town grew lies in the middle of it, closed in by hills.
It is worth looking at the bridge together with its contemporaries: the church of San Martino, which keeps canvases by Orazio De Ferrari and Giovanni Lorenzo Bertolotto, and the Spinola marquis' palace, today the town hall. The name Ronco appears for the first time in a document of 1127, when the land belonged to the bishops of Tortona; in the thirteenth century it passed to the Spinola, and in 1242 the podestà of Genoa came this far to besiege the villages, which by 1249 were back in the hands of the feudal lords. Of the Spinola castle little more than a place name survives, while a second stone bridge, over the Ladde torrent, really is attributed to the thirteenth century.
Visiting
Ronco Scrivia lies in the upper Scrivia valley, north of Genoa and beyond the Apennine watershed: winters are harsher than on the coast and snow falls more often. The town is a major railway junction between Genoa and Turin, and for exactly that reason it was the target of the Allied bombers of Operation Strangle, which destroyed much of it during the Second World War; the bridge is among the things left standing. It is a few minutes' walk from the centre, it is crossed freely, and it has neither opening hours nor tickets.
Our editors' tip
Our advice is to go down to the bank and look at it from below: only from there do the four arches read as a single piece, while walking across it feels like nothing more than a road. Then climb back up towards the town hall. Knowing that the bridge, the palace and the church come out of the same seventeenth-century building campaign changes the way you read Ronco, a town that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cut into three pieces between railway and roads, and that holds those pieces together thanks precisely to its crossings.