Rustici

From Bellinzona, we drove to the near edge of Locarno on Lago Maggiore and then turned northward into Val Verzasca. The only way to enter Val Verzasca by car is to come from the south: the Alps block access from the north. Several small villages perch on the valley's steep mountainsides and along the Verzasca River. Formerly farming communities (or probably more accurately, subsistence communities), these villages have largely given over to the tourist industry. Ticino is an especially popular destination for German tourists. Indeed, almost every other tourist we ran into during our off-season trip was German.

Rustici, the characteristic houses of Ticino's small villages, are constructed of dry-stacked stone supported by log beams. Walls, roofs, cantilevered steps: all stone. The houses are beautifully photogenic and the villages charmingly picturesque, but in the centuries before the rustici were renovated into comfortable summer homes and tourist rentals, they must have offered pretty rugged shelter for the year-round rural residents. The stone houses are prevalent from the valleys to the summer grazing lands high up on the mountain tops.