Montanera

Montanera was founded by monks from Valcasotto early in the thirteenth century, around a chapel of the Assumption the village calls Madonna Lunga. In the charterhouse papers the name sits beside locus praedialis, a cluster of farmsteads. The White Company, a mercenary band, destroyed it; in 1424 Cuneo willed it back, and the new village went where it is still called Villa, close against the Stura.

With that river the accounts never balance: between an eighteenth-century map and today's, twenty houses have gone, eaten by landslips on the bank. The parish front carries the carved dedication to the Transfiguration of the Saviour, Christ painted in an oval and the clock tower alongside.