Monteviasco, a thousand steps and a cable car idle from 2018 to 2025
No road reaches Monteviasco, a hamlet of Curiglia con Monteviasco in the province of Varese, Lombardy, 950 metres up above the Val Veddasca on the Swiss border. Until 1989 the only way up from Ponte di Piero was a mule track laid out in 1813, roughly a thousand steps. Then came the cable car: 981 metres of cable, a 400-metre climb, fifteen standing passengers. On 12 November 2018 a maintenance worker was crushed by the cabin at the lower station and the line stayed shut for almost seven years, until 10 August 2025. In the meantime the fifteen or so residents, mostly elderly, went back to counting steps.
