Sassello, a world to discover
Journey to the land of Amaretto where life is sweet: in Sassello there is a whole world to be discovered little by little...
We’ll let you in on a secret, here’s how Liguria works: just step away from the crowded Via Aurelia, look up towards the mountains, and you will discover another Liguria, another world.
So, when you get tired of bathing and sunbathing, from Albissola, Varazze or Celle, looks northwards and cross the coastal ridge. Your Pillars of Hercules are now the pylons of the A 10 motorway. You have to pass right through there to discover another land, a new Ligurian continent of colours, aromas and flavours. Let the SP 334 guide you into the sweet world of Amaretto. If you start from the sea, it will take you through gentle bends towards the Giovo Ligure pass from which the Sassello valley opens up like a treasure chest. If, on the other hand, you come from the north, it points to the imposing Monte Beigua in the background, and you will know you have crossed the border between Piedmont and Liguria because of the majesty of the forests.
In the land of Amaretto
At a certain point the hills and woods open up and you reach Sassello the amaretto capital. Sassello is an Bandiera Arancione village, but if there were a Sky Blue Flag for good air (in addition to the Bandiera Blu Flag for the sea), it would be the absolute winner: the cool winds come purified from the slopes of Beigua and the streams carry cold, crystal-clear water under the village bridges and into the mill blades. But in the centre of Sassello, the air smells of amaretto, almonds and coffee. From here, the amaretto, a soft biscuit with the unmistakable bitter-sweet taste of almonds, set out to conquer the world. La recipe is disarmingly simple, as it always is in these cases: just almonds, armelline (apricot kernels), eggs and sugar. No gluten, no lactose. Ideally, you should come here for the Amaretto Festival in September.
The central square, Piazza Concezione, elegant, almost Habsburg-style, once housed a bakery that produced amaretti biscuits, a regular event for locals and tourists alike, so much so that the square was also known in old postcards as ‘Piazza degli Amaretti Virginia’. Even today, it is a treat to sit at the café for a coffee and enjoy an amaretto. But Sassello is a true taste capital. In addition to amaretti biscuits, you will fall in love with cured meats, dried mushrooms or mushrooms in oil, and oval rolls called ‘tirotti’, made of wheat flour and potatoes.
The Mill
To make bread you need flour. To make flour you need a mill. Etc. Etc
In Sassello, paraphrasing Sergio Endrigo’s song, you could go on and on: to make wheat you need the fields around Sassello; to move the mill you need the Rio Sbruggia and so on, like in a small ancient world. In fact, the Sassello Mill has been here since 1830 and still works like this: water comes into the basin from the Rio Sbruggia, a stream with a regular flow because it has a tuff bed, and drives the machines that turn the heavy millstones. The mill can make 60 kg of flour per hour, about 45,000 kg of wheat per year. Saturdays are dedicated to customers grinding their own wheat or corn.
It is a slightly coarser flour that comes out of the tumbler: yellowish, comparable to a 0/1, like the flour that used to be made from spelt, rye or maize, depending on what was needed. It’s fine for any home use, but here with cornflour, as well as polenta, they make Moonshine a distillate that has won awards such as the gold medal in 2023 and 2024 at the World Whiskey Awards in London and that, after three years of ageing in French oak barrels, in November 2025 will become Signor Camillo, the Whisky named after the grandfather of Diego Assandri the progenitor of three generations of millers.
Sweet memories of a good life
What a beautiful story that of Amaretti Virginiais. It all starts with a common family recipe and a peasant tradition of using the available almonds, apricots and eggs to welcome guests with an exquisite treat. Mrs Gertrude Rossi, who ran an inn in the village in 1860, began offering it as a dessert: so many people came to Sassello at the end of the 19th century to taste her amaretto, that her son decided to name and register that treat. The idea came while talking to some customers returning from America, lovers of the ‘Virginia’ cigar, a fortunate name that stayed with the amaretti. Today the company has grown and has customers all over the world (it even has a store in Sweden), but the amaretti are still made according to the original recipe, which has not changed since 1860. All that has been added is a very wide range of flavours, from coconut to vanilla, almond, cinnamon and many others, but the amaretti are always wrapped in the shape of candy with colourful paper and the old motto ‘sweet memories of a good life’.
La Foresta della Deiva
What does Sassello have in common with New York? A large green lung in the heart of the city. All things considered, here there is not just a park in the city centre, but a real forest! As many as 800 hectares of chestnut, beech, oak, maple and Scots pine trees. This is the Deiva forest where the people of Sassello like to relax, play sports or bring their four-legged friends, a great little taste of the majestic Beigua Park a Unesco heritage site. You get there via a nice gravel road that plunges into the forest from Sassello. In a few minutes you are among centuries-old trees, the only sounds the calls of birds (with a little luck, at dusk, you may hear the call of a Strigiform, an owl, which are particularly at home here). Then the greenery, and before your eyes and between the branches, in the tightest hairpin bends, you will see the placid village waiting down below for you. In the forest, as in every fairy tale, you will find a castle: it is the mysterious Castello Bellavista where you can have a picnic; and then the Giumenta drying room, where chestnuts were once processed, but which looks like a gnome’s house. You can also reach the Pollaio didactic area, with the sensory and educational path in Sassello for blind and visually impaired people.
A spasso sull’Alta Via dei Monti Liguri
From Sassello, Beigua can be seen, heard, breathed, drunken from and literally eaten. And if you need to leave the A 10 to discover your Liguria, it is another road, almost above the clouds, that you must seek out and fall in love with: the Alta Via dei Monti Liguri, the ridge of hiking trails that crosses the whole of Liguria for more than 440 km and passes through here in stage 21, from the Pratorotondo refuge to the Faiallo Pass. Here you will understand better than anywhere else why its called ‘Alta Via’: you will find a path that ‘flies’ at above a thousand metres, but only 4 km from the sea. Up there your eyes will find no end of gifts: to the west the coast towards Savona, with the island of Bergeggi and the Gallinara; to the east Genoa stretching along the coast, then the mountain of Portofino and Punta Manara.
