The Torrione | Rocca d'Arazzo
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The Torrione proper stood, until the first half of the seventeenth century, on a hill of tuff that dominated the panorama of Rocca.
By the beginning of the last century it was already half-destroyed and only a few bricks remained, but its name was still used by the inhabitants to define the sandcastle-like hill that supported it centuries earlier.
At the end of the 1960s, Rocca lost this symbol of its: following repeated landslides and mudslides, the Torrione was razed, and the earth obtained from its flattening, transported on wagons that for a long time shuttled on specially placed tracks, was used to fill in the gaps in the high rivass below the village, in a vain attempt to stem the current and the raging floods of the Tanaro that continued to erode it. Today, in place of the Torrione, there is a square.
The highest point of the fortress has always been, for the children of Rocca, a magical and mysterious place: as long as it existed, everyone, at least once, climbed to its top, imagining that they were medieval warriors or castellans.
The children of the Serra and the Tana, the villages adjacent the Torrione, anticipating the Halloween party by many years, on the night between October 31 and November 1 would stuff carved and illuminated pumpkins into the ravines, making the hillside spooky and fueling the belief that the Masche, or witches, were meeting on it.
More practical, the adults of the neighbouring houses, in the small "crutin" dug inside, put the wine to age or put the tools there.
In short, this familiar giant friend, as Vanni Cornero defines him in his book on Rocca, “always collapsed (…), cluttered, was useless. But, let's face it, in the depths of our hearts we lack a little".
Insights
Comune di Rocca d'Arazzo
https://www.comune.roccadarazzo.at.it/
- Piazza del Torrione
https://www.comune.roccadarazzo.at.it/it/page/piazza-del-torrione-7edf5f10-e252-43e4-86c3-26706748e6e0
See also...
• Rocca d'Arazzo tourist guide
