Two very different men passed over the Fenêtre de Durand, the pass into Switzerland, and both were running: John Calvin, looking for refuge, and Luigi Einaudi, escaping the nazi-fascist police.
Long before them the pass served the Salassi to trade metals with the Valais, and under the village there really was copper: the mines, worked industrially from the seventeenth century, had their best years in the early twentieth, with the American furnaces of Frissonière and the hydroelectric plant, and were declared exhausted around 1945. The donkeys that carried the ore are still celebrated: since the 1970s the 158 residents hold the Fëta à l'âno, which ends with a donkey race.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Ollomont
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