Tradition holds that Dalmatius was martyred in 254 on the banks of the Vermenagna, and that his body, disputed between several villages, was placed on an ox-drawn cart: he was buried where the animals stopped, which is here. The town was called Pedona; the present name appears in the twelfth century as Burgum Sancti Dalmatii.
Under Caligula, Pedona collected the tolls of those crossing the border between Italy and Gaul. Today the town has 12,372 residents between the Stura di Demonte and the Gesso, and is one of Italy's centres for farming edible snails.
Fun facts about Borgo San Dalmazzo
The patron is Saint Dalmatius, the lay preacher killed in an ambush on the banks of the Vermenagna on 5 December 254: the feast falls on that day, with the services concentrated on 4 and 5 December in the parish church.
In the same week, though, Borgo remembers something else too. Between 8 and 13 September 1943 some eight hundred Jewish refugees left their forced residence at Saint-Martin-Vésubie and crossed the Maritime Alps into Italy; on 18 September the German command ordered every foreigner in the district to report by six in the afternoon. The SS captured 329 of them and shut them in the former Alpine barracks, a crumbling building on the edge of town, close to the railway.
On 21 November 1943 those 329 people were loaded into cattle wagons at the station and taken to Nice, then to Drancy and finally to Auschwitz: eighteen came back. The camp reopened under the Italian Social Republic from 4 December 1943, with twenty-six Italian Jews; on 15 February 1944 they left as well, by way of Fossoli, and two survived. Since 2006 the station square has held the Memorial to the Deportation, designed by the architects Manuel Giuliano and Andrea Grottaroli: a concrete slab standing in for the service platform of the freight wagons, twenty upright figures for those who returned and three hundred and thirty-five plaques on the ground, one for every name that did not. A few steps away, in the former church of Sant'Anna, the MEMO4345 museum tells that story.
One man from Borgo fought it in person: don Raimondo Viale, a curate already banished to Molise for his stand against fascism, who after 8 September organised hiding places and false papers for the Jewish refugees of the Cuneo area. In 2000 his name was inscribed among the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem; Nuto Revelli devoted his book Il prete giusto to him.
The Borgo San Dalmazzo guide
Experiences in Borgo San Dalmazzo
What to see in Borgo San Dalmazzo
abbazia di San Dalmazzo da Pedona A Lombard church over a Roman necropolis: crypts, tombs under glass and the saint's silver bust. 
Museo dell'abbazia di Borgo san Dalmazzo Beside the church: the silver bust, the Lombard stones and a Roman customs officer's tombstone. 
Memoriale della Deportazione In the station square, twenty figures for those who returned and 335 plaques for those who did not. 
MEMO4345 In the former church of Sant'Anna, the museum that gives back the names of those deported. 
santuario di Monserrato A Black Madonna on the hill above town, with a portico and a balcony over the Cuneo plain. 
chiesa della Confraternita di San Giovanni Decollato The oratory of the brotherhood that attended men condemned to death, in late baroque marble. Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Borgo San Dalmazzo
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
