Garessio

Garessio sits at 621 meters in the upper Tanaro valley, on the watershed where Piemonte meets Liguria. The town is built across four historic borgate: Borgo Maggiore, Borgo Ponte, Borgo Poggiolo, and Borgo Valsorda, each with its own piazza and parish. In the Middle Ages this was a stop on the salt road: Mediterranean salt came up over the Ligurian Alps from Albenga, was repacked here, and continued north toward Piemonte and the Po valley.

Three of the four fortified gates survive, Porta Rose, Porta Jhape, and Porta Liazoliorum, along with stretches of the twelfth-century walls. The Savoy family kept a hunting lodge at the Reggia di Valcasotto, a former Carthusian charterhouse on the slopes above town. The Acqua San Bernardo spring, bottled commercially since the 1920s, still runs from a fountain in Borgo Valsorda. The Alpine Wars of 1940 and 1944 brought partisan fighting to these ridges; the town remembers them at Colle San Bernardo.