Carema (Carema in Piedmontese, Caréma in suprialectal arpitano, Caèima in eastern Aosta Valley patois, Carême in French, Kwarusunh in Töitschu) is an Italian town of 773 inhabitants in the metropolitan city of Turin, in Piedmont, on the border with the Aosta Valley.
The Via delle Gallie, a Roman consular road built by Augustus to connect the Po Valley with Gaul, passed through Carema, in Roman times. The toponym Carema in fact derives from the Latin expression quadragesimum lapidem ab Augusta Praetoria (it. Forty miles from Aosta "), denoting an origin of the town after the foundation of Aosta by the Romans. Another hypothesis is that the origin of the name is Caremam, meaning "customs".
The historic center
In the moraine basin, marked by an imposing
series of terraces torn from the mountain and planted with vines,
stands the old village of medieval origin, with its narrow streets,
stone houses leaning against each other. The pergolas supported, for
a large part, by the typical stone and brick columns, whitewashed
with lime, called tupiun in the Piedmontese language, constitute the
most characteristic aspect of the landscape. It produces a wine of
great substance and tradition called Carema.
Proposal for
aggregation to the Aosta Valley
On 18 and 19 March 2007 a
referendum was held in the Municipality in accordance with Article
132, paragraph II of the Constitution, which proposed the detachment
of the Municipality from the Piedmont region to aggregate it to the
Valle d'Aosta region. The overwhelming majority of citizens approved
the proposal which, however, having heard the opinion of the two
regional councils concerned, did not lead to the change of regional
borders.
In favor of those who supported the thesis of
unification with the Aosta Valley, there is the fact that Carema was
once a dependency of the Duchy of Aosta, so much so that the
historian Jean-Baptiste de Tillier inserts the Carstrussons or
Castruchons, ancient lords of Carema (or Caresme or Caremme, in old
French for de Tillier) among the noble families of Valle d'Aosta in
his work Nobiliaire du Duché d'Aoste, citing precisely this
circumstance as the reason for this.
Along the alleys and on the tiny squares there are
several stone fountains. The most characteristic is that of via
Basilia, built by the Counts Challant-Madruzzo in homage to the
Dukes of Savoy in 1571: the granite stele placed at the tip of the
basin is adorned with the heraldic coats of arms of the Savoy and
the Kings of France.
Among the vestiges of early medieval
flavor, at the corner with via Bottero, the Grand Maison, or Gran
Masun, a "stronghold" that must have originally had defensive
functions, should be remembered. On its sturdy stone walls there are
small windows with iron bars, framed by rustic architraves and
piers; the remains of heraldic coats of arms are visible on the
facade. The Torre degli Ugoni also has a defensive function.
The bell tower, 60 meters high, built between 1760 and 1769, marks
the profile of the landscape from afar.
At the ends of the
basin that forms the background of the village, two votive buildings
dear to popular devotion are placed, almost as sentinels: on the
left, the small chapel of Siei, and on the right, above a spike of
rock, the seventeenth-century chapel of San Rocco.
The ruins
of Castruzzone Castle still cling to a rocky spur in the hamlet of
Airale, a castle that in 1357 Amedeo VI received as a perpetual
fiefdom from the Bishop of Ivrea, together with Carema.