Grognardo

The village first appears in 991, as Ragnando, in the deed founding and endowing the abbey of San Quintino at Spigno. It probably began for defensive reasons on the hill called Poggio, today one of its hamlets: up there, most likely against Saracen raids, a castle went up with several rings of walls enclosing houses and a church. In the eleventh century Saint Guido, bishop of Acqui, had the first church built, the pieve of San Felice, to root Christianity in the countryside. Once defence no longer mattered, people moved down towards the plain — the notarial deeds call the new settlement Villa del Piano — and the castle, abandoned between the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century, was taken apart by the villagers, who carried off its stone for their own houses.

After 8 September 1943 and the German occupation, a Jewish couple from Genoa, the Urmans, found shelter here. Having escaped deportation in Genoa, they were helped by a customer who happened to be in their clothing shop, the seventeen-year-old Gabriele Garofalo, who took them with him to Grognardo to his father, the podestà; presented as evacuated relatives, they stayed with the Garofalo family until the Liberation. On 16 January 1979 Yad Vashem in Jerusalem named Francesco and Elsa Garofalo Righteous Among the Nations.