At about 10 minutes by car, and about two hours walk, there is the splendid Mombaldone, rightly elected to be one of the most beautiful villages in Italy.
To reach it on foot or by bicycle, you can pass by the village of Denice, take a small road (via Mombaldone) that starts a few steps from the center of the Denice weighing area and stay at high altitude.
You enter the old Mombaldone from an ancient door and you are revealed in front of the country that has remained as such for centuries: a central street paved in stone and houses and houses on the sides, all in stone … at a certain point a small square opens up that seems painted, with two churches side by side of the sweet baroque country style … At the top, there is a castle of which only the square plan remains, which was, like the whole village, owned by the Marquises del Carretto, one of the noblest families of Italy, which owned much of Piedmont and Liguria.
Marquise Gemma and Marquis Umberto … you can easily meet them, because among all the possessions they chose to stay right there, in Mombaldone. Gemma is an artist and has embellished the village with paintings, rhymes written on tiles; Marquis Umberto, on the other hand, opened a special restaurant, the Hereafter in a part of the noble palaces, where he proposes exquisite dishes of the Piedmontese noble tradition and receives the guests in rooms and lounges that look like the set of a film set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and instead … they are really authentic!
Town festivals and fairs :
The fritters festival is held at the end of May
The festival of medieval Mombaldone, with re-enactments of period costumes, has been suspended in recent years: a real shame.