Traversella

Traversella lies in the Valchiusella, its hamlets — Cappia, Succinto, Fondo, Tallorno — strung out one after another up the Chiusella. The old houses are stone, with lobbie, the wooden balconies where maize and chestnuts were hung to dry, and roofs of lose, thin slabs of stone.

The village lived on iron. Mining rights were disputed with the local lords for centuries, and in a lawsuit of 1571 the inhabitants described their own home as «a stony, barren place where neither grain nor wine is gathered, save a few chestnuts that do not last a quarter of the year». The Bersella galleries yielded magnetite, scheelite and copper until they shut for good in 1971.