The Perrando family is one of the oldest in Sassello and the first member of whom there is news is Guido Pranda, brought to Susa by Frederick Barbarossa in 1163 as a hostage from Sassello and executed there.
It should be noted that the name Perrando only became consolidated between 1300 and 1400. In earlier times, they were indiscriminately referred to as Pranda, Prandi, Parda, Pardi, de Prandis, de Pardo. It is not uncommon to find in the same document the same person mentioned with two or even three variations of the name.
From the beginning of the 1300s until the mid-1800s, members of this family are invariably mentioned in all documents concerning the public life of the Municipality.
As is known, information about this town is very scarce as long as the Marquises of Ponzone were its feudal lords, but it becomes rather abundant from 1293, when Branca Doria and his son Bernabò replaced them.
The people of Sassello did not fail to notice the difference between the old feudal lords, who had regular imperial investiture, and the new lords, who were completely without it. They soon took it upon themselves to discuss the conventions, and a Bonadeo Perrando is found among the members of the first commission elected for this purpose in 1301. The discussion was resumed in 1365, and a Percivale Perrando was part of the commission, and the name Perrando appears in all the other nine commissions appointed for this purpose until the end of the 1500s.
In 1427 a Giovanni Perrando was for about ten years a councilor of the municipality of Savona, and his name was entered into the nobility of this city.
A Giacomino Perrando was, in June 1593, the promoter of the revolt against the Doria. Condemned to death and confiscation of property, he saved himself by fleeing beyond the borders, but died before the Republic of Genoa had promulgated the pardon to all those condemned after having acquired the regular investiture of the fief from the Emperor.
The seventeenth century saw many members of the Perrando family distinguish themselves for works of charity, and it is precisely during the 1600s that the foundation of the charitable works established in Sassello bearing this name began. In 1607 a Monte di Pietà was founded and among the 189 founders, 14 were Perrando.
In the record of the oath of allegiance to the Republic of Genoa in 1612, the names of 27 heads of families bearing the name Perrando appear.
Among all the members of the house, one stands out above all in this period: a Pier Maria who, having been widowed, took holy orders and after a few years, in 1626, was appointed parish priest of the church of St. John the Baptist (the portrait of Don Pier Maria Perrando is on display in the museum). The town of Sassello had been largely burned by the troops of Charles Emmanuel I in that same year and the spirits of the people of Sassello were further embittered by the discord caused by an order from the bishop of Acqui imposing the division of the parish. The new parish priest, endowed with great kindness and a very persuasive manner of speaking, had the merit of restoring peace among the population by demonstrating that two parish priests could comfortably live in the town. The same parish priest had those elms planted in the churchyard which, until a few years ago, gave such a characteristic appearance to the whole landscape.
In the 1700s, many Perrando distinguished themselves in various fields: ecclesiastical, judiciary, medicine, military. Among them all:
‒ Ottavio, a Capuchin friar, sent to Corsica by the Ligurian government to calm spirits at the outbreak of the islanders' insurrection.
‒ Simone Francesco, jurist from Genoa.
‒ Jacopo, graduated in medicine in Genoa, was chief physician at the Pammatone hospital after also graduating in Turin.
‒ Gio Batta known as Basciscia, first a member of the People's Committee then prior of the Municipality, worked hard, sacrificing his personal finances, to help the less well-off during the famine at the end of the century.
Among the most important of the 1800s:
‒ Giò Michele (of the Perrando "Millifìn" branch), played a very active role in the administration of the Municipality, was advisor to the painter Brusco in the choice of subjects with which to decorate the church of the Holy Trinity, recently established as a parish. He collected many books in his house, especially on history, and also left a very detailed chronicle of the calamitous times of the democratic revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the famines. These memoirs were checked and used by the Savonese scholars Noberasco and Scovazzi.
‒ Simone Benedetto (of the Perrando "Pistulìn" branch), graduated in law, magistrate president of the Tribunal and counselor at the Court of Appeal of Genoa, was also Senator of this city.
‒ Giò Batta (of the Perrando "Basciscia" branch), prelate who died as custodian of the Sanctuary of Savona, collected a quantity of historical information about Sassello (the original of his memoirs is kept in the archive of the Amici del Sassello).
‒ Another Giò Batta was general father of the Scolopi in Rome, wrote the entries Ovada-Sassello-Tiglieto for the "dictionary" of Casalis, left his magnificent library to the parish of the Holy Trinity. His portrait is kept in the council chamber of the Municipality of Sassello, which is located in the building he left as an inheritance precisely for the purpose of giving a worthy seat to the public administration.
‒ Don Pietro Deo Gratias (in the photo), who can certainly be considered the brightest star of the whole house. He was parish priest of Santa Giustina (Stella) where he built a new parish church, with its rectory and cemetery, founded the school for elementary education, becoming much loved and esteemed by his parishioners. A naturalist of great fame, he was one of the pioneers of those sciences that had their "dawn" in the 1800s: paleontology (he collected thousands of fossils in the Sassello-Santa Giustina basin, later given to the Institute of Geology of the University of Genoa, then directed by Prof. Arturo Issel, several hundred are on display in the Sassello museum), and palethnology (he collected hundreds of prehistoric lithic finds in the Sassello area, now exhibited in various museums, the best known in that of Genoa-Pegli). Before giving his collection to the Institute of Geology, he housed the collected specimens in his brothers' house (the current museum site), then he wanted to have a free apartment he owned nearby and soon filled that too, then tried to invade the house of his closest relatives. He was born on January 19, 1817 and died on January 19, 1889, a few minutes after turning 72.
The branch of the Perrando of Sassello rapidly died out between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s. Many prelates, many sterile marriages or lacking male descendants.
In the first half of the 1900s, the noble male Perrando descendants residing in Sassello were reduced to four: Michele, pharmacist in Acqui Terme; Gian Giacomo, full professor of forensic medicine in Cagliari then in Genoa; Giuseppe (Pippo), counselor of the Court of Cassation (the portrait of his wife Benedetta Barberis is on display in the museum); Jacopo (in the photo), director of the pediatric hospital of St. Philip in Genoa. Only Jacopo had two daughters: Egle and Ebe, who did not marry and thus with them the noble Perrando family residing in Sassello became extinct.
Ebe (in the photo with Egle), the last survivor, died on August 9, 1962; in her last years she was tormented by the idea of seeing the family definitively extinguished and in order to preserve its memory, she thought to include a clause in her will. Leaving the San Antonio Hospital of Sassello as universal heir, she expressed the wish that the most valuable objects be kept in rooms of her ancestors' house to which public access would be allowed. The Hospital therefore entrusted the association Amici del Sassello with the task of establishing a museum to be named after the Perrando family, making available the entire second floor of the house.
Historical notes on the Perrando family
