Frantoio Benza, in Dolcedo

There's the backcountry you see from the coast, a line of hills behind the houses, and there's the real one, which you have to go and find by climbing up the valleys. The one with dry-stone walls, terraced olive groves, stone villages where the road narrows and the sat-nav starts to sweat. Dolcedo is one of those places, and that's where I send you, for one precise reason.

Dolcedo sits up in the Prino Valley, about fifteen minutes behind Imperia. It's an old village, the kind with a medieval bridge — the Knights of Malta bridge, from 1292, a humpbacked stone span that has been crossing the stream the same way for seven hundred years. Caruggi, a square, the smell of woodsmoke in winter. The Ponente that tourists often miss, because they stay down by the sea.

Dolcedo's humpbacked medieval stone bridge crosses the Prino stream, below the bell tower and the houses of the village.

And in Dolcedo there's the Benza oil mill. A family of millers since 1853: five generations making Taggiasca olive oil, the delicate, barely-bitter one that is ours. You go, they welcome you, you taste, you buy direct — usually by the tin, which is the right way to buy good oil around here. If you want a guarantee, there's the DOP «Riviera Ligure». I already mentioned them when I told you where to buy oil: Benza is one of the names, the slightly more «polished» one, with a welcome set up for people coming from out of town too.

The Benza family at the olive harvest in a vintage photo: a mill since 1853, five generations.

Taggiasca extra-virgin olive oil and Riviera olives on an olive-wood board: the green gold of the Ponente.

But the reason I'm giving them a piece of their own isn't just the oil.

A friend who really knows this stuff reminded me — one of those people you only have to tell «I went to Benza» and the list starts. Because Benza isn't just an oil mill: there are preserves too, and that's where the gem is. The olive pâté and the pitted Taggiasca olives are excellent — that round, slightly sweet flavour that only Taggiasca has. But the thing he told me not to skip for any reason is the sweet-and-sour trombette zucchini, crunchy: «a hell of an antipasto», his words, and when someone talks like that about a jar, it means it's the real deal. It's a truly Ligurian product, the kind they don't even know exists down in the plains.

Trombette, by the way, are a small family obsession here: Emma adores them, the long pale ones from the garden. Finding them done sweet-and-sour, crunchy, to open in winter when summer is just a memory, is one of those things that makes you understand how the cooking here works: nothing gets thrown away, everything gets preserved, and each season leaves a jar for the next.

I'll be as honest as he was with me: they also have aubergines and peppers in oil, and they're good. But let's be fair, the podium for aubergines in oil in Italy is fiercely contested, and that's a hard step to knock anyone off. The Taggiasca, the pâté, the trombette: there, instead, they're playing at home, and they win.

That's why Benza, to me, is more than an oil mill. It's an excuse to drive up to Dolcedo, see the bridge, wander the caruggi, and come back down with a boot that smells of oil and of Liguria. It's the real backcountry, the one you can't see from the beach.

The caruggi and the square of Dolcedo, with the town-hall archway and the bell tower rising above the colourful houses.

If you're at Stella sul Mare and one morning you feel like getting up from the sea, do this: drive up to Dolcedo, stop at Benza, have a tin of oil filled and grab a jar of sweet-and-sour trombette, the pâté and the olives. Then go and see the bridge, and you'll understand on your own why the real Ponente begins where the coast ends. And if you need to know where else to buy oil, or where the Taggiasca comes from, I've already told you.