In 1734 the Remedi marquises opened a small square in front of their own palace, planted the column of the Immaculate Conception in the middle of it and turned it into a belvedere over the Magra valley. The gesture says everything about the family: arriving in Ponzano Superiore at the end of the seventeenth century, the Remedi of Sarzana had bought land after land, introduced sharecropping, built the farmhouses and set their own residence at the centre of the village. The square still goes by two names, piazza dell'Immacolata and piazza Colonna.
What to see
The palace is a private building in the old core of the village and its main front works as the backdrop of the square: from there the eye runs over the Magra plain, over Luni and the river estuary, and on good days as far as the sea of the Gulf of La Spezia and the Versilia coast. Inside, still private, there is a small and well-proportioned courtyard closed at the far end by a nymphaeum: from that point the Remedi could look down at Villa Pratola, their house on the plain, left among the fields near the Cisa road.
Leaning against the complex, opposite the parish church of San Michele Arcangelo, stands the oratory of the Santissima Annunziata, for centuries the seat of the confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament and the Annunciation. The Fivizzano earthquake of 1920 cracked both the church and the palace. From the end of the nineteenth century the Remedi began selling off plots of land and parts of the building to families of modest means, so the manor house ended up divided among several owners.
Visiting
Ponzano Superiore is the upland hamlet of Santo Stefano di Magra and you drive up by a road surfaced only in 1956, which ended the isolation the Pontremolese railway had left it in. The palace cannot be visited: you look at it from the square and the lanes around. A little further on, the parish church of San Michele, consecrated in 1528, has a Lucchese-style bell tower built on the foundations of one of the towers of the medieval castle.
Our editors' tip
Stand by the column and look for the outline of Villa Pratola down on the plain: it takes a second to understand why the square was opened exactly there. If you can, come up on the third Sunday of September, when the village awards the national poetry prize named after Cesare Orsini, the macaronic poet born here in the sixteenth century.