Carona

Half an hour above the village stands Pagliari, a handful of slate houses built without foundations, which they call the village of stone: it grew in the sixteenth century along a path used by travellers and by smugglers going round the customs post at the Passo di San Marco. Today it is uninhabited, but more than half the houses have been restored; its little church is dedicated to San Gottardo, who protects from landslides and avalanches.

The Romans came up here for the ore and set up a furnace to smelt iron; the mines and the piodere, the slate slabs for roofs, kept the valley going for centuries, until Austrian duties closed them at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then came the water: at the start of the twentieth century ten dams were built in this territory, and the lake beside the houses is one of them.