Celle di Macra

The name of Celle di Macra probably goes back to the medieval cellae, the small monastic outposts that great abbeys set up in the countryside; this one would have belonged to the abbey of Villar San Costanzo. Another reading derives it from selle, the stacks of timber piled up here. The oldest documents date from 1280 and concern arbitration over boundary pastures with Castelmagno, in the Valle Grana, a quarrel that lasted more than two centuries. Celle was one of the twelve valley communities living by the good customs later set down in the Statutes of the Valle Maira.

Its real trade, though, was the travelling anchovy seller, the ancioè, which grew up in the nineteenth century alongside farming and is traced by some to older Spanish immigration. From late autumn to spring the men took the roads of Piedmont and Lombardy with a handcart and salted fish, and seasonal work turned into a settled business. The former church of San Rocco now holds the museum devoted to it; the parish church of San Giovanni Battista keeps a polyptych of 1496 by Hans Clemer, the Master of Elva.