Roccaforte Ligure sits on the divide between the Sisola valley, a tributary of the Borbera, and the Spinti. A fief of the Genoese Spinola from the early fifteenth century, in the seventeenth it rose to a marquisate, enriched by an imperial grant: the right to take tolls on goods climbing from Genoa's port towards Lombardy along the Via del Sale. With that money the marquis Napoleone Spinola raised a new trading village across the Sisola, Borgonuovo, with inns, granaries, mills, a mint and a press that issued the statutes of the Order of Malta.
When the Imperial Fiefs fell in 1797, Napoleon's army sacked the place and burned the marquis's archive to destroy the papers of the old holdings. The town lay then in the province of Novi, in Liguria; it passed to Alessandria in 1859 under the Rattazzi reform and in 1863, four years after leaving Liguria, took the name Roccaforte Ligure. At Chiappella a stone marker turned up, a dish carved on one face, an amphora on the other: one reading takes it for a vow paid to the Matrons, whence Ara delle matrone.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, on 23 April
On 23 April Roccaforte Ligure, a municipality of 154 inhabitants in the province of Alessandria, celebrates its patron Saint George, to whom the pieve (rural parish church) is dedicated.
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 Roccaforte Ligure, but an easy day trip away.
