Sambuco

Sambuco sits in the upper Valle Stura di Demonte, in the Occitan-speaking area. The name most likely comes from the elder that grows around here, but also from the sambuca, an old triangular harp used in religious rites. Its arms are split in two: above, on red, a silver fort with Guelph merlons on a mountain; below, on green, a paved Roman road in silver.

The chapel of San Giuliano, the patron saint, stands in the cemetery: Romanesque, twelfth century, its narrow windows cut in tufa. At Clauzio the bell tower of San Bartolomeo, raised in the mid-sixteenth century, watches the valley alone, its church long gone. In the nineteen-twenties barracks filled the village, and the Galleria Comando was driven into the mountain above, with an inner ramp and a buried lookout. The Sambucana sheep takes its name from here, down to some eighty head in the nineteen-eighties and since brought back.