A (small) Atlantis

Piedmont also has its own little Atlantis. It is in the Ossola Valley area in the Verbano-Cusio-Ossola Province, on the border with Switzerland. More precisely, in Val Formazza. There, at an altitude of about 1,800 meters, until the 1930s, there was the small village of Morasco, whose settlement, dating back to the 13^th-15^th centuries, is owed to the Waslers, a population of Germanic origin inhabiting the Alpine regions around the Monte Rosa massif.

In the early 1900s, the Ossola Valley experienced a moment of great economic growth, thanks to the development of the hydroelectric industry (aka white gold). Among the dams created from scratch was the one at Morasco, where there was a handful of wooden and stone houses with a church and a bell tower, by that time uninhabited except during the summer season.

And so, the past, whose memory is kept alive by a small oratory in the hillside, gave way to the future: to an infrastructure of arduous construction that would greatly contribute to the industrialization of the valley and all of Italy.

For its construction, that took place in the 1936-40 years, at 1,815 meters of altitude, work could only be carried out for 4 months in the whole year, when frost and snow made it possible to climb to higher altitudes, via the new specially built roads, reaching the warehouses and village, also built from scratch just for the 1,200 workers working day and night on the project.

A railway line allowed them to draw gravel, sand, and stones extracted from a quarry 3 km away. Instead, trolleys, cranes and cable cars allowed cement and concrete to be transported to the site.

The dam, made of concrete, is 50 meters high, with a reservoir of 19,380,000 cubic meters (119,000 cubic meters of rock and earth were excavated to make it), has a discharge capacity of 269 cubic meters per second and a radius of curvature of 556 meters.

The Morasco dam, together with the Toggia dam, by means of a 5-km-long tunnel crossed by three tunnels and 2 drainage shafts supplies the Ponte power plant (built in 1929-32). Instead, in 1957, the Morasco hydroelectric power plant was inaugurated, but it uses water from the Sabbione artificial reservoir (with 26,000,000 cubic meters of capacity). 

The Morasco Dam and the Formazza Valley are a popular destination for mountaineers and trekkers, who tackle green trails during summer and snowshoe ones during winter - an increasingly popular fashion whose origins are lost in the mists of time.

In fact, the first snowshoes date back over 8,000 years. They were used by peoples of the cold areas of Asia, Canada, and North America. Back then, the Earth was not like it is today, but a bit colder: it was the end of the last ice age, which began about 110,000 years ago, with Europe and Eurasia under a large blanket of ice.