The Most Beautiful Village in Italy that we admire today is Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena, in the province of Savona (Liguria).
Castelvecchio is the first and the most beautiful of the walled villages of the Neva Valley, wrapped in a circle around the castle that dominates it and, with its fairytale name, looks like a stone flower blossomed at the top of a gentle slope.
The sea of Albenga is only 15 kilometers away but up here it looks like another world: small, intimate, remote, for a few connoisseurs, like the artists who rediscovered Castelvecchio by contributing to its repopulation.
At sunset, the smoke coming out of a chimney arouses nineteenth-century nostalgia, indeed it takes you even further back in memory, up to the times of Ilaria del Carretto: before being immortalized in the funeral monument sculpted by Jacopo della Quercia, the young daughter of the Marquis will have walked through these alleys and cultivated her composed beauty in the fortress ...
The "Ilaria's path" that connects Castelvecchio with Zuccarello, the other castle that saw his youth blossom, today allows you to remember it walking among the chestnut and olive trees, among the scents of the Mediterranean scrub, in the silence that poets like ...
