Gottasecca

The name Gottasecca means dry drop. Tradition holds that oil once seeped from a stone beside the altar of the Assunta sanctuary and healed any illness, until an old woman brought her sick piglet to kiss it: from that day the stone stayed dry, and the village, called Lavaniola before the tenth century after the old Savona quarter, took the name Gutta sicca. The stone is still walled in beside the altar, inscribed as the place the oil once flowed from.

The sanctuary began as a pieve in the fourth or fifth century, called Santa Maria Degudega, on the ridge road from Alba to Millesimo; that position probably made it a stage on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. The first written record is in the diplomas of emperor Otto III of 998, and until 1602 the pieve was the seat of a vicariate. Its bell tower has two tiers of arches and ends in an onion spire scaled with slate.