Brugnato

Brugnato sits in the Val di Vara, the broad inland valley that runs from the Apennine ridge down toward the La Spezia coast. The town grew around a monastery dedicated to Saint Columbanus, the Irish missionary who founded Bobbio in 614, and the settlement that formed around it took its shape from the monks' presence long before it took its later civic form. The centro storico is laid out on a rare medieval grid for Liguria, straight lanes of pastel houses inside a walled perimeter, set on a low rise inside a meander of the river.

The layout and the site both point back to the same origin: a religious foundation that outgrew its walls and organized a town around itself, one that later carried authority over the surrounding valley as a bishopric until 1820. Brugnato holds Borghi più belli, Bandiera Arancione, and Infioritalia, the last for the Corpus Domini flower-petal carpets that cover the streets each June. The town's present character, an inland valley seat with a monastic and diocesan past now expressed mostly through architecture and a single yearly ritual, follows directly from that founding order having outlasted the institutions that built it.