In 1802 a landslide buried a good part of this village, causing damage and deaths. Villa Guardia picked itself up and went on being a municipality for another century and a quarter: it was suppressed only in 1928 and joined to Pontedassio. Today a little over three hundred people live here.
What to see
A village of the Imperia hinterland that followed the fortunes of its neighbours: over the centuries it passed among the dominions of the marquisate of Monferrato, the Republic of Genoa and the duchy of Savoy. With Napoleon it ended up first in the Ligurian Republic and then, from 1805, directly in the French department of Montenotte.
In 1804, in the middle of the Napoleonic reorganisation, the municipality of Sarola was joined to it, though it became independent again a few years later. Then the Congress of Vienna returned it to the Kingdom of Sardinia, and from there it passed to the Kingdom of Italy. A century of changing flags, and in the middle of it the landslide.
Visiting
Villa Guardia is a hamlet of Pontedassio, in the valle Impero, behind Imperia; you walk the village streets freely, with no ticket and no hours. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Raise your eyes to the slopes above the village and look for the fasce, the terraces held up by dry stone walls. They were the only thing holding this land still: every wall retains the soil and every terrace slows the water. Where they have been abandoned the slope has started moving again, and that is why in Liguria landslides are not a memory of the nineteenth century.