The name means “little mound”, and the old village indeed sits on a cone-shaped rise with a flattened top, in the hills left of the Grue. Montegioco first appears in 1152 as a locality of the district of Tortona; the census of 1541 counted 22 inhabitants, most of them tenant farmers of the nobleman Antonio Francesco Opizzone, and little more than thirty years later the parish counted two hundred.
In 1647 the community paid the Ducal Chamber a large sum to avoid being enfeoffed to Nicolò Busseti, then gave up its independence and passed to the Busseti anyway, who made it a marquisate. The castle, badly damaged in 1406 by the Guelphs fighting the Visconti's Ghibellines, has left nothing on the ground, but it remains on the arms, in base, under a green three-peaked mount, grapes and an ear of wheat. At Palazzo the Busseti's seventeenth-century residence was instead rebuilt in the twentieth century to look like a castle, and only a bell-gable is left of its beginnings.
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📅 Every year, on 15 August
On 15 August Montegioco, a municipality of 326 inhabitants in the province of Alessandria, celebrates its patroness Santa Maria Assunta (Assumption of Mary).
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Montegioco, but an easy day trip away.
