Carmagnola

In Carmagnola the pepper is a serious matter: the national fair at the end of summer, one of the largest in Piedmont, has been celebrating for over seventy years the four local varieties, the square, the long, the spinning-top and the tumaticot, which the farmers of the Po plain have made famous throughout Italy; once they cooked here a pepper stew of eleven hundred and ninety kilos, which the Guinness book registered as the largest in the world. Before the pepper, though, the wealth was hemp: these sandy soils grew it well, and from here went out ropes, hawsers and canvas for the fleets of Liguria and for Marseille.

The old centre, with its arcades and its baroque churches, recalls the marquisate of Saluzzo disputed between France and Savoy; here the marquises kept a mint, which struck among other things a coin called the Cornuto, showing the emperor Constantine on horseback. Somewhere near here, around 1382, was born Francesco Bussone, the soldier of fortune everyone called il Carmagnola, to whom Manzoni would devote a tragedy. Being a fortress town, however, had its price: in the middle of the seventeenth century three suburbs outside the walls were pulled down because they got in the way of the defences, and their people rebuilt them a mile further off, where they still stand; and in 1799 the district of Salsasio, which had driven the French back, was burnt in reprisal. Turin is half an hour away: here, though, the calendar is still set by the vegetable garden.