Borgosesia

The patrons are Saints Peter and Paul, to whom the parish church is dedicated, and the feast falls on 29 June: in Valsesia they call it San Peru al Borg, and in recent years the carnival committee has stretched it to ten days of music, dinners and funfair.

Above the town, though, a far older door opens. In the karst of Monte Fenera, at 670 metres, lies the Ciota Ciara cave: it is the most important evidence of the Middle Palaeolithic in Piedmont, and the University of Ferrara has been excavating it since 2009. In 2020 and 2021 three teeth of a young individual came out of it, attributed to Neanderthal man: the university places the central part of the deposit at around three hundred thousand years, with the radiometric dating still under way. The material gathered in the Fenera caves can be seen down in town, at the museum of archaeology and palaeontology opened in 2007 and named after the sculptor Carlo Conti, who had explored those caves in the 1910s.