Rocchetta Ligure stands where the Sisola joins the Borbera, and for centuries it belonged to the Ligurian imperial fiefs, held by the Genoese Spinola. Once he had won the right to levy tolls on goods coming up from the port of Genoa towards Lombardy along the salt road, Marquis Napoleone IV built a new village on the far bank of the Sisola, planned around that traffic: inns, granaries, a slaughterhouse, a weighbridge for livestock and goods, mills, covered washhouses, a powder store and lodgings for the muleteers, along with a daily market, a printing house opened in 1673, where the statutes of the Order of Malta were printed, and even a mint.
Palazzo Spinola, raised as the marquises' summer residence and later left empty, is now the town hall: from 1999 to 2005 it held the European base of New York's Living Theatre, and it houses the Val Borbera museum of the Resistance. On 13 August 1944 Tito Tosonotti, from Savona, and the lawyer Luciano Pertica opened a hospital in Palazzo Tassorello with surgical equipment salvaged in Genoa; it worked until the end of the war, treating partisans and Nazi-Fascists alike.
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📅 Every year, on 26 July; the Sagra della fagiolana on the second Sunday of September
On 26 July Rocchetta Ligure, a municipality of 210 inhabitants in the province of Alessandria, celebrates its patroness Saint Anne (sant'Anna); in September the Sagra della fagiolana is held.
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 Rocchetta Ligure, but an easy day trip away.
