Ceriana is a typical mediaeval town built on the site of a Roman settlement called "Castrum Coelianae". It stands on the right bank of the Armea in the hinterland of San Remo. The structure of the town is concentric and it is crossed by a network of small streets. You will find it interesting to stop and look at the architectural details of the buildings, which tell of everyday life in bygone days: the doors and portals, the decorations and friezes, the sixteenth-century shops, the cisterns and stone tanks.
The religious architecture and sacred art in such a limited space surprisingly offer many examples of different periods and styles. For example, there are the four oratories which host the city's confraternities (distinguished by colour: the Reds, the Blues, the Greens and the Blacks). During the Jubilee Year, these veritable social and religious institutions will house an exhibition of ancient furnishings and clothing. The seventeenth-century parish church of Saints Peter and Paul holds a poliptych dating from 1526 by an unknown author; the wooden choir and the organ are by Lorenzo Paoli. The church of the Santo Spirito dates from the twelfth-thirteenth centuries but was completed in the sixteenth century: worth mentioning are its sculpted portals. The church of Sant'Andrea, which may have been built on the site of a former pagan temple, holds a fifteenth-century wooden crucifix. The seventeenth-century Palazzo dei Conti Roverizio has some curious stone Baroque masks on the portico pillars.
Local gastronomic specialities are mainly meat dishes: rabbit, thrush, wild boar, "cima" and meat jelly. The local sweet specialities called "crustoli" are really worth tasting. The surrounding landscape is dominated by olives and vineyards and, higher up, by chestnuts and conifers. If you take the road leading to the Ghimbegna Pass you will come across the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Villa. Giulio Natta, the Nobel prize-winner for chemistry, was born in Ceriana.
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