Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena

The village takes its second name from the outcrop at whose southern foot it sits, above the valley that gives the area its own name. It dates to the eleventh century and was a fief of the Marquis of Clavesana through the twelfth and thirteenth, before losing importance to neighboring Zuccarello. It was sold to the House of Savoy in 1623, besieged in 1672, and ceded to the Republic of Genoa.

The commune is the second-smallest in Savona province by population. The fortress stands above the rooftops, reached by its own footpath, while the old core occupies the ground below it, houses and passages knit together by the vaulting that has kept them standing through the region's earthquakes. The parish church sits within that same fabric, its bell tower the one part of the settlement visible from the road below. What the sequence of ownership and siege did not undo, the building method did: a settlement still standing because its stone was braced to move with the ground rather than break against it.

From Genoa (GOA), about 1h 28m by car.

Turin (TRN) is about 2h 12m away.

By car from the centre of Milan 2h 51m.

Every town within reach of Genoa airport.