NE, Liguria — Its name is almost impossibly short: Ne, just two letters. But in this small municipality tucked into the mountains behind Liguria’s Levante coast, there is a surprisingly long story to tell — one that stretches from ancient chestnut groves and water-powered mills to Argentina, California and New York.

Featured in an episode of Rai’s television series Radici d’Italia*, the village lies in the Val Graveglia, a narrow, rugged valley between the mountains and the sea. Its scattered hamlets preserve traces of a rural world that once depended on chestnuts, mills and tiny plots of land carved into steep hillsides.

But the most enduring legacy of the valley may be found thousands of miles away.

An Argentine flag hangs from the balcony of the municipal building in Conscenti, one of Ne’s many hamlets — an unmistakable sign of the ties that have connected this corner of Liguria with Argentina for generations.

Local surnames tell part of the story: Garibaldi, Podestà, Rivara, Beirano and others appear repeatedly in the valley and among the families who left for South America.

For those who remained, life was shaped by the land.

At a 19th-century mill, local historian Anna Garibaldi offers two possible explanations for the origins of the municipality's unusual name. One traces it to the neviere, mountain sites where snow and ice were stored before refrigeration. Another links it to the Latin nemus, meaning a cultivated woodland.

The second theory seems particularly fitting in a valley where chestnut trees once dominated the landscape.

“The chestnuts were the bread and butter of the valley,” Garibaldi explains.

Chestnuts were not simply a local delicacy. They were a basic source of food for families living on difficult terrain, where agriculture required extraordinary effort.

The valley was once known as the “valley of mills.” As many as 120 mills operated along its streams. Grain and corn came by mule from the Po Valley, while chestnuts were processed locally. The flour was then carried toward the coast and traded.

One surviving mill still works today, powered by a small stream. Its horizontal sandstone wheels are a rare example of a technology that once defined the valley.

But even all those mills could not solve the valley's fundamental problem: there was never enough land to support everyone.

A valley of emigrants

The steep slopes had to be transformed into terraces and dry-stone walls to make room for vineyards, olive groves and vegetable gardens. Farming was painstaking work, often done by hand.

And when harvests failed, there was little margin for survival.

“They left in order to live, to eat, to survive,” sculptor Franco Casoni says of the generations who left.

Casoni knows the story personally. Like many people in the valley, he has relatives in Argentina. For earlier generations, crossing the Atlantic was not an adventure or a choice made lightly. Families put their children on ships and sent them toward relatives or acquaintances already established abroad.

The journey could take weeks.

Some emigrants returned after making money. Others never came back. Their descendants, however, often retained a powerful attachment to the places their families had left behind.

Casoni describes that migration as part of a much larger story of survival.

“When there were years when there were few chestnuts, what could people do?” he asks. “They took the children, put them on a ship, and sent them away.”

The destinations multiplied: Buenos Aires, New York, California, Chile, England.

In some cases, the connection with the old country has lasted for generations.

One local winemaker recalls that relatives continue to return from Buenos Aires. “They are in love with these places,” he says, describing descendants who come back to the valley even after several generations.

From the mines to America

The valley's economy was not based only on farming.

Mining became another defining chapter in its history. At the Gambatesa Mining Museum, visitors can trace the story of manganese extraction, which transformed the local economy from the late 19th century onward.

At the height of the mining industry, as many as 600 people worked in the mines. Women were employed as ore sorters, separating the red rock from the dark manganese-bearing material. It was, according to the museum, the first paid job available to women in the valley.

The mines extended for dozens of kilometers beneath the mountains and produced a variety of minerals, some extraordinarily rare.

One of them is Gravegliaite, named for the valley itself.

“It has been found only here,” the museum guide explains.

But while the mountains yielded minerals, the valley continued to lose people.

In Reppia, old agricultural tools preserve the memory of the families who worked on the land. One was used to clean dried chestnuts after they had been beaten to remove their husks. Another, the mandillo da gruppo, was a large cloth used to carry food during long journeys on foot.

Among the people who left were the ancestors of Angelo Joseph Rossi, an Italian American who became mayor of San Francisco.

His descendants have returned to the valley with photographs and family documents tracing the journey of their ancestors to the United States. Two brothers left for America to work in the mines; one eventually returned to Italy after surviving a mining accident, while the other remained in California.

Their story is one of thousands.

Keeping the land alive

The legacy of emigration is visible not only in family trees but in the way local people understand their responsibility for the landscape.

At a local winery and restaurant, the owner describes his work as more than a business.

“This is my land,” he says. “Preserving it has become not only about running a restaurant, but about maintaining a presence here and helping the many farmers in our area who preserve the territory.”

The same philosophy applies to wine.

At a cellar holding about 3,000 labels, a Bianchetta Genovese is poured — a grape native to the province of Genoa. It was made in an old-fashioned style, with a long maceration on the skins and fermentation in amphorae.

The terrain makes viticulture difficult.

“It is truly heroic agriculture,” the winemaker says. “The land here is rugged, and it is not easy to cultivate.”

Generations built terraces and dry-stone walls to make farming possible. Today, preserving those landscapes also means preserving the memory of the people who built them.

Traditions that crossed the ocean

That memory is particularly strong in the valley's religious traditions.

At the church of Campo di Ne, locals prepare an elaborate 18th-century crucifix for a procession. The crucifix weighs 126 kilograms and is passed from one bearer to another as they move through the streets.

The tradition is centuries old and extends throughout the valley. It also traveled with emigrants.

“Especially in Argentina,” a local explains, the tradition was preserved by people who had left Liguria.

Some emigrants even donated money to reproduce the elaborate decorations for crucifixes used in processions in Argentina.

Food followed the same route.

In the hamlet of Zerli, locals still prepare testaieu, a humble dish made from a simple batter and cooked directly in small terracotta vessels called testetti. It can be served with olive oil and cheese or with pesto.

The recipe is a reminder of a time when cooking was dictated by what families could grow, make or afford.

A story bigger than Ne

The story of Val Graveglia eventually leads to Genoa, one of the main departure points for Italian emigrants crossing the Atlantic.

At the National Museum of Italian Emigration, director Pierangelo Campodonico describes the museum as a collection of individual stories — a “kaleidoscope” of lives shaped by migration.

“Not everyone left only because of economic need,” he says. Some emigrated “out of a desire for freedom,” personal fulfillment or the hope of creating a different life.

For communities such as Val Graveglia, however, economic necessity was often the starting point.

Today, the direction of travel is sometimes reversed.

Descendants of emigrants return to find ancestral homes, family names, old photographs and the landscape their grandparents described. Some were born in South America and returned as children. Others arrive generations later, drawn by stories that have survived across oceans.

In Ne, the past is not confined to museums.

It lives in chestnut flour, old mills, terracotta cooking vessels, vineyards and mines tunnels. It survives in family names and religious processions. It can be heard in stories about Buenos Aires and San Francisco.

And it hangs from the balcony of the town hall in the form of an Argentine flag — a small but powerful reminder that for the people of this remote Ligurian valley, leaving home never meant completely leaving it behind.

*Radici d’Italia is a Rai television series produced as part of the “Roots Tourism” initiative promoted by Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU program.

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