Santa Margherita di Staffora

The village that gives the comune its name is not the one where the town hall stands. Santa Margherita di Staffora is a scattered comune of the upper Staffora valley, in the mountain Oltrepò: the seat is at Casanova di Destra, down on the valley floor, while the old centre of Santa Margherita is high up on the right-hand slope, with the church above the rock from which almost the whole valley can be seen and, on the side hidden from the road, the remains of the fortified house of the Malaspina marquises. The place of Santa Margherita is already named in the deed of enfeoffment of 1164, and the Malaspina of Varzi held the fief until the end of feudalism. Today's comune, though, dates from 1929, put together out of the old one, a piece of the suppressed comune of Cella and the locality of Bersanino taken from Menconico.

The name has travelled too. From 1863 the comune was called Santa Margherita di Bobbio, and Bobbio is now in another region: in 1848, with the province of Bobbio, these lands passed from Liguria to Piedmont, and in 1859 to the province of Pavia, that is, to Lombardy. Culturally, however, they belong to the Quattro province, the territory straddling Alessandria, Genoa, Pavia and Piacenza where people dance to the sound of the Apennine piffero, backed by the accordion and once by the müsa, the bagpipe of these mountains. At Cegni carnival is held twice a year: on the Saturday before Lent and then on 16 August, for the white carnival, when the story of the poor woman is acted out before the villagers and the outsiders who come on purpose.