Acceglio

Acceglio is the last village of the Valle Maira, closed in by Cottian Alps peaks that in places pass three thousand metres and partly mark the watershed with France. Some scholars derive the name from Latin ad cilium or pre-Celtic forms such as ocelum and oscelum, most probably meaning a place set high up; it first appears as Cilio in a document of 1028 listing valley lands given by Olderico Manfredi II, marquis of Turin, to the monastery of Caramagna.

In the early thirteenth century Acceglio passed to the marquisate of Saluzzo and formed, with the twelve comuni of the upper Macra valley, a kind of free republic: it paid the marquis tribute and had its franchises and «good customs» confirmed in return, which left it largely independent. In the sixteenth century, French along with the whole marquisate, it became a leading centre of Calvinism, until Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy seized it and forced most of the population to abjure and the stubborn into exile. The border stayed porous: in the eighteenth century a Savoyard intendant complained he could not stop the «fraudulent trade» of the roughly two thousand villagers, «because too many are the roads that lead out of the village»; in 1944 Italian partisans and French maquis met at the hamlet of Saretto to sign a pact of alliance.