The name is a person's: it comes from Vercilia, and goes back to Roman times. The village lies at the bottom of the Valchiavenna, looking out over the lake of Mezzola and the Pian di Spagna reserve, where the water birds break their journey. Beside the tunnel of the cycle and footpath another one opens, of quite a different nature: it is a mine gallery of 1917, one of the works of the Frontiera Nord line of fortifications. The church of San Fedele, on the other hand, is nineteenth-century, and took the place of a single-nave Romanesque church that a fire in the seventeenth century had wrecked.
At nine hundred and twenty metres runs the Tracciolino, which did not start life as a path: it is the trace of a narrow-gauge railway built to carry materials, and from up there one way leads to the Moledana dam, put up in the nineteen-thirties, and the other towards the Val Codera. Above opens the Valle dei Ratti, with the paths of the Sentiero Italia, the Frasnedo refuge and, higher up, the Volta refuge, from which one crosses into the Val Masino by the Primalpia pass.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Verceia
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
