Gorzegno

The name Gorzegno may go back to Cohors Aennii, the Roman garrison unit under a centurion called Ennio: an uncertain guess, yet the municipality built its arms on it, with a labarum lettered SPQR and Cohors Aennii. Until the eighteenth century it gave its name to a Del Carretto marquisate recognised as an imperial fief, holding together eleven «università», or communities, of the Alta Langa; of the marquises' castle few ruins are left.

The church of San Giovanni Battista, later rededicated to the Madonna della Neve, rose in the early Middle Ages on the foundations of a pagan temple, as votive stones of the second century found there suggest; they are now in the Museo Eusebio at Alba. Beppe Fenoglio set Un giorno di fuoco here, drawn from a real event of October 1933 that reached him twenty years later through stories still going round the Langhe.