Pretty fraction of the city of Imperia. Its name means place with many Myrtles, a plant sacred to the Roman goddess Venus. For many centuries, since the Middle Ages, the town was divided into two hamlets: Moltedo Superiore and Moltedo Inferiore. In the eighteenth century the two parts belonged to different states of divided Italy, respectively to Piedmont and the Republic of Genoa.
The Prela valley extends towards the sea up to Moltedo, a town surrounded by olive trees close to Porto Maurizio, formerly called Morteo, i.e. a place full of myrtles, from "myrtetum". In the Middle Ages the cultivation of myrtle was very extensive, because the plant was used to decorate churches and to tan leather; tanning was a well-documented activity in the Val Prino (first half of the 17th century) with numerous "fides" in the deeds of Dolcedesi notaries.
Moltedo and divided into two districts, the lower one once belonged to the Genoese and the upper one was part of the Savoy jurisdiction. A small stream divided the two villages and the Savoyard state from the Genoese one at the same time. Therefore, the inhabitants of the same parish were subjects of different states.
As a border village, smugglers and brigands found refuge there, for reasons of traffic or by invoking the right of asylum. Tradition has it that, among these, the famous Flemish painter Antonio VanDyck (1599-1641) took refuge in Moltedo. In 1624, perhaps in the church of S. Anna, he would have painted the famous picture of the Holy Family, using the rough canvas used by the peasants for the olive harvest, after having been the protagonist of a romantic adventure with a young Genoese patrician, Paolina Adorno , his model for a painting of the Madonna and next wife of Count Antonio Giulio Brignole. A tender love had blossomed between the two with a sensational epilogue when on the very day of their wedding with Brignole, the enterprising artist with a mask on her face kidnapped the noblewoman and with her took refuge in Moltedo in Savoyard territory.
Translated by Google •
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