Castelnuovo di Ceva

Castelnuovo di Ceva sits on a wooded upland whose waters feed the Langhe aqueduct. The name comes from the Latin Castrum novum: the village was rebuilt with a castle after a destruction blamed on Saracen raids, and an eleventh-century deed already places it in the county of Bredulo. One thirteenth-century tower survives, sandstone with very little mortar, its only door set high up for safety; whether it belonged to a walled keep of two towers or was a lone lookout on the road to Savona, historians disagree.

By the cemetery stands the old parish church, the chapel of San Maurizio, frescoed in 1459 by the late Gothic school of Mondovì, close to Provençal painting and to Jaquerio: the martyrdom of the Theban legion and its commander, Saint Michael weighing souls. In 1929 the municipality was abolished into Montezemolo and Priero, and restored in 1947. In 1966 a plane came down in the chestnut wood above the village: among the eight dead was the Aosta Valley deputy Corrado Gex, remembered by a stone there and by the square named after him.