Moncenisio

Moncenisio was called Ferrera Cenisio until 1940, when the fascist podestà moved the town hall up to the pass and changed the name of the village as a gesture against France; its people are still called ferreresi. The old name came not from the traffic over the pass, as was long believed, but from iron: Luca Patria's research brought to light a settlement charter of 1224, by which burghers of the Val di Susa and the Maurienne agreed with the abbey of Novalesa, which owned the land, to work its mines, bringing in labourers from Bergamo.

Once the iron ran out in the fourteenth century, the village became a stage on the Via Francigena up to the pass: in its best years it had four inns, and the men lived by guiding travellers and carrying them on mules or in litters called ramasses, mere bundles of branches, whose bearers were known as marrons. Napoleon's road cut the village off and made that trade useless; the collapse that followed, and the fact that nothing was built afterwards, have kept it in its oldest shape, with sundials inscribed in Franco-Provençal.