Dernice

Dernice sits on the ridge between the Curone and Borbera valleys, on the old salt road from Genoa to the Po plain. Its name, from the Latin Darnisium, appears in documents from 869; the emperor Louis II confirmed the abbey of San Colombano di Bobbio in its possession of the monastery of Vigoponzo, now a hamlet of the comune. Of the castle survive a square tower at the top of the village, lowered because it was unsafe, and a round keep below; in the seventeenth-century parish church a wooden group shows Saint Donninus at the moment of his martyrdom, whereas the usual iconography shows him after it, head in hands.

Another hamlet, Montebore, gave its name to a mixed-milk cheese of stacked truncated cones of decreasing width, like a wedding cake: the shape seems to copy the ruined tower still standing there. In 1489 it was the only cheese served at the wedding feast of Isabella of Aragon and Gian Galeazzo Sforza; production died out in 1982 and was revived some fifteen years later, when the last woman who knew the technique was found.