Villar Focchiardo

Villar means a small villa, a farm settled by villeins; Fuciard, perhaps of German origin, probably comes from the name of a vassal. Piedmont has a good many communes beginning with Villar, and the name looks medieval, from the time when Occitan was spoken here.

Above the village, at eleven hundred metres, the Carthusians built the charterhouse of Montebenedetto at the end of the twelfth century, and abandoned it in the sixteenth; of the correria beside it little is left, a colossal landslide having carried it away. Lower down, at about six hundred metres, another charterhouse, Banda, was in use between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.