I forti della strada del Melogno. Memoria distratta e imperfetta, e incerti destini, per le opere di fortificazione costruite fra XVII e XIX secolo per il controllo delle vie di comunicazione del Finale verso il Piemonte e la Lombardia

This paper presents the results of a research aimed at recognizing the sites and defining the consistency of some forts and entrenchments prepared in the seventeenth century to control the road from Finale to the valleys of Bormida (now Provincial Road 490), the Melogno pass and the watershed. The reconnaissance on the ground, supported by the documentary evidence and historical and current cartography, has allowed the identification of the remains of a series of small forts, part of a network of "minor" elements for territorial defence, extended also to the other two main communication routes of the Finale with Piedmont and Lombardy, where two other sites of forts and six sites of entrenchments have been identified (two of them with consistent remains). An extended system, which has fallen into disuse as political balances consolidated, and then largely dismantled, and forgotten (common conditions with the nineteenth-century Melogno forts that have replaced it), and which requires urgent actions of protection and enhancement