Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena

Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena sits at the southern foot of the limestone outcrop that gives it its second name, the Rocca Barbena, which rises to 1,142 meters above the Val Neva. The village dates to the eleventh century and was a fief of the Marquis of Clavesana through the twelfth and thirteenth. It later lost importance to neighboring Zuccarello, was sold to the House of Savoy in 1623, besieged in 1672, and ceded to the Republic of Genoa.

The Clavesana castle still stands above the rooftops in private hands, square-walled and partly collapsed from old sieges, reached by a footpath. Below it, the centro storico is a sequence of arched passages where stone houses lean on each other and the streets pass under load-bearing vaults built as anti-seismic bracing. The parish church of the Assunta, with its arcaded bell tower, is a seventeenth-century rebuild on a medieval base. The commune is the second-smallest in Savona province by population.