A Butterfly on the Hills of Monferrato: A Trip to Discover Olivola

A small great world of peace, where every glimpse reveals a piece of history and enchants the traveller with its mild and sweet beauty. Ancient houses, walls of light stone, rust-coloured roofs above which a vast panorama opens up over the surrounding hills, among which the eye can skip without effort from one village to another. We are in the smallest municipality of Lower Monferrato, whose present tranquillity is the result of a very long series of struggles and wars that concerned this locality over the centuries. Its strategic position attracted peoples to Olivola since the dawn of time, the first among them Germanic tribes, from which the original name of the place would derive, Freengo or Fringo. It is believed that the settlement was born in the ninth century, after the invasion of the Franks, consolidating in the years 1100-1200.

Before that period it was part of the fief of Frassinello, and subsequently it belonged to the marquises of Monferrato, being enfeoffed to various families, among them the Celloria, the Ferraris and the Candiani, whose nineteenth-century villa, today restored and home of the Ristorante Ai Cedri, still dominates the village. In recent times the municipality risked once again losing its autonomy, having been annexed, in 1928, to the Municipality of Frassinello. Olivola returned to being an autonomous municipality in 1950, following a petition by its inhabitants to the President of the Republic. Our walk in Olivola begins from Piazza Europa, the heart of the municipality, and thanks to an excursion project that attracts numerous tourists here every year, it continues along a broad route shaped like a butterfly.

The route is called “Scorci sulle ali” (Views on the Wings) and is tackled lightly and without any particular effort. Before plunging into the surrounding nature, along roads lined with thick bushes of hawthorn and blackthorn, admiring vineyards as far as the eye can see and photographing even some cheerful poppy flowers, we visit the most important monuments of the village, concentrated right in the main square. The Parish Church of San Pietro, built from 1895 and completed in 1938, dominates the square with its gabled façade. Not far away we admire one of the oldest religious buildings of the place, the ancient parish church of Saints Peter and Paul from the tenth century, no longer used for religious functions, with a characteristic Romanesque bell tower in tuff.

As proof of how strong the cult of the patron Saint Peter is, just outside the village, in a very panoramic position, there is another Romanesque church dedicated to the Saint. During our walk we also visited the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, built in 1630, at the wish of the inhabitants of Frassinello as thanks for having survived the plague epidemic that had scourged the area that year. The butterfly route also led us to discover, among the thick vegetation on the border of the village with Moleto, an ancient healing spring, called Curella. Our walk ends near Villa Guazzo-Candiani, where, in a field below the building, we admire an imposing isolated cedar. We decide to stop for dinner right here, at the very elegant Ristorante Ai Cedri, also taking advantage of the possibility of staying in the welcoming rooms of the establishment immersed in greenery.

We settle at the tables of the splendid hall of the noble palace and begin to enjoy a dinner in keeping with the style of the Villa itself: specialities of the best Monferrato tradition, which change periodically according to the season, often revisited with contemporary creativity. We begin with a rich Piedmontese starter, tasting among other things the classic hand-chopped raw meat, the old-style vitello tonnato, the courgette flower stuffed in a two-colour sauce and a crispy potato flan with a chocolate foie gras escalope. We follow these delicacies with the traditional raviolini del plin with roast sauce, the purple potato gnocchi with a light rocket and prawn pesto, the ricotta and herb balls with butter and sage and the raschera and spinach ravioloni with Tropea onion jam. We wash down these treats with excellent Piedmontese wines and in particular Monferrato ones.

In choosing the second courses we divide between steamed salt cod with cherry tomato zabaione and a spring vegetable marinade, the veal fillet with leeks, the oven-baked suckling pig leg in milk and the lamb chops with rosemary. Our day ends with the pleasure of a few sweet guilty pleasures among the chocolate mousse, fruit sorbets, the Dolce Piemonte, a pear flan with Moscato and a warm chocolate flan.

Francesca Bertha

FOR INFORMATION:

Ristorante Ai Cedri Via V. Veneto, 23 Olivola (AL) 0142/938885