There’s a September Sunday when the sea is no longer enough. The sky above Genoa is high and clear, the kind that makes you want to look beyond the roofline, beyond Porto Antico, toward the hills that climb dark behind the city. It’s a different call from that of the beach: quieter, cooler, almost monastic. And it’s to a monastery that this Sunday takes you.
Just sixty kilometers and a little over an hour’s drive from Genoa is enough to leave the coastal traffic behind and find yourself in a valley where time seems to have stopped in the Middle Ages. Here, among the beeches and chestnuts of the upper Ligurian Apennines, at the border with Piedmont, stands a place that very few Genoa visitors know: Tiglieto Abbey, the oldest Cistercian foundation in Italy outside Burgundy. A name that means little until you cross the threshold of that silence.
Tiglieto: an abbey from 1120 in the heart of the woods
Founded on October 18, 1120 by monks from the Burgundian abbey of La Ferté, Tiglieto Abbey bears the weight and grace of nine hundred years of history. It is considered the first Cistercian abbey founded in Italy, a distinction that places this corner of the Ligurian Apennines in a spiritual geography far broader than its isolation would suggest. The white monks chose this place for the same reason you do centuries later: distance from the world, availability of water and timber, a silence that invites contemplation.
The architecture visible today tells of successive layers: the original Romanesque layout mixed over the centuries with later interventions, and the complex lived through the vicissitudes common to many Italian abbeys, with suppressions, changes of ownership, and recoveries. What remains is a sober, almost austere architectural organism that does not seek amazement but substance: stone, shadow, proportion. Walking through its spaces gives you a rare sensation, that of finding yourself in a place that was not conceived to be viewed, but to be inhabited in silence.
Around the abbey, the village of Tiglieto developed slowly, remaining one of the smallest and least visited municipalities in the province of Genoa. Don’t expect comprehensive tourist services or crowds of visitors: it’s precisely this discretion that today is its greatest value.
Capanne di Marcarolo Park and the Stura and Orba valleys
Tiglieto sits at the gateway to the Capanne di Marcarolo Regional Natural Park, a protected area that stretches between the Stura and Orba valleys, at the border between Liguria and Piedmont. It’s a landscape that surprises those who still expect the Liguria of palms and olives: here beech forests, centuries-old chestnut groves, and extensive high-altitude meadows dominate, an Apennine that looks more like the Alps than the sea just a few kilometers away as the crow flies.
The park is known among Ligurian and Piedmont hikers for its rich fauna: it’s not uncommon, walking at dawn or dusk along the quietest trails, to spot deer, roe deer, and wild boar that populate the woods in considerable numbers. For those who love observing wildlife, autumn is the best season: with the roar of stags that, in the first weeks of October, breaks the silence of the valleys as evening falls.
The trails crossing the park intertwine with the history of the Via del Sale, the ancient route that connected the Ligurian coast to the Po Plain through Apennine passes, used for centuries by muleteer transporting salt, but also goods and people, between Genoa and the Piedmont interior. Walking today on some of these paths, among dry-stone walls and remains of ancient tollhouses, means literally retracing the routes of a trade that made the fortune of the Republic of Genoa.
Valley villages, between abandonment and recovery
The Stura and Orba valleys are dotted with small rural villages that tell another side of the Ligurian Apennines: that of mountain depopulation that emptied, over the course of the twentieth century, dozens of small communities. Some settlements today lie partially abandoned, with stone houses with slate roofs facing silent alleyways; others have been carefully recovered, often thanks to residents who never left the valley or those who chose to return.
It is not a landscape from a postcard in the conventional sense, but it has a more authentic beauty, less domesticated: that of places that have never prepared themselves to be photographed. Walking among these hamlets, with the rustle of chestnut trees and the isolated song of some bird of prey in the sky, restores a sense of peace that along the coast, in summer, is increasingly difficult to find.
How to reach Tiglieto from Genoa
The most convenient way to reach Tiglieto remains by car. From Genoa you take the A26 motorway in the direction of Alessandria/Gravellona Toce, exiting at the Masone or Ovada toll booth depending on your chosen route, then continuing on provincial roads that climb up the Stura valley. The journey is approximately 60 kilometers and requires about an hour and a quarter, a time that may vary slightly depending on motorway traffic and mountain road conditions, which are often narrow and winding but always passable with care.
Those without a car will find the connection more complex: the Apennine hinterland between the Stura and Orba valleys is not served by direct rail lines, and bus connections to Tiglieto and neighboring municipalities are limited, designed more for residents than tourists. For this trip, in the absence of your own vehicle, it is advisable to consider renting a car for the day, or organizing with a small group to share the cost of a ride. It is one of the rare destinations in this column that truly requires four wheels.
It is worth remembering that the abbey, being still a place of worship and partly managed by religious figures or local associations, may have limited visiting hours or require booking: before you leave it is always good practice to check the availability of a guided tour or at least the opening of the abbey church.
An itinerary for the day
Leaving Genoa in the early morning, arrival in Tiglieto is roughly around mid-morning. It is the ideal time to visit the abbey, when light filters obliquely between the arcades and the complex is still wrapped in the quiet that the first visitors of the day rarely disturb. Spend a leisurely hour in the abbey church and the visitable spaces, allowing yourself to be guided, if available, by someone who knows the history of the place better than any information panel.
At noon, the most sensible choice is to look for one of the valley trattorias that dot the small centers of the area: simple establishments, family-run, where the cuisine still follows the rhythm of the seasons and forest products. Between September and October it is not uncommon to find porcini mushrooms gathered that very morning on the table, chestnuts, game when the season permits, and dishes from Apennine peasant tradition, closer in spirit and ingredients to Piedmontese cuisine than you would expect staying so close to Genoa.
The afternoon lends itself to a walk in the Parco delle Capanne di Marcarolo: a not-too-demanding path through beech forests and mountain meadows, perhaps toward one of the panoramic viewpoints from which, on clearer days, your gaze can stretch to catch a glimpse of the sea’s profile in the distance. Those who prefer a slower pace can simply stroll through the valley hamlets, observing the rural stone architecture and letting yourself be told, perhaps by a resident you meet on the road, the recent history of these places.
The return to Genoa in the late afternoon allows you to be back in the city by evening, with plenty of time for dinner in the center or simply to enjoy the relief of returning to a comfortable bed after a day of walking and mountain air.
The detail that makes the trip worthwhile
What makes Tiglieto a different experience from any other outing in Liguria is not a single monument or a picture-postcard view, but the feeling of being in a place where European religious history and the most remote geography of the Ligurian Appennines intertwine without anyone pointing it out with signs or multilingual guides. You will not find buses full of tourists or souvenir stalls: you will find a nine-hundred-year-old abbey that continues to exist almost quietly, protected by the same distance from the world that the Cistercian monks sought in 1120. It is a rare privilege today to be able to visit a place of such historical importance without having to share it with anyone.
Returning to Genoa, with the forest still on you
There is something special about returning to Genoa after a day spent in the silence of the Apennine forests: the lights of the city, the sound of the sea, the scent of salt that returns to be felt as you descend toward the coast seem to have a new flavor, almost of discovery. Genoa, on these return evenings, is no longer just the starting point: it becomes the safe harbor you return to with images in your eyes of another Liguria, less told but no less authentic.
If you want to organize a Sunday like this, the advice is to leave early and choose as your base one of our residences in the heart of Genoa, convenient to reach the motorway to the hinterland in a short time and equally pleasant for a relaxed return in the evening. To orient yourself among other possible trips from the Ligurian capital, our guide to the city brings together itineraries and practical advice, while the rest of the column on La Superba tells a different piece of this territory every Sunday. If the desire for forest, silence and history is calling you, we are here: you can book your stay and set out to discover another Liguria, the one that climbs, instead of descending toward the sea.
