Carcoforo is a Walser village in the Val d'Egua, a side branch of the Val Sermenza in the Valsesia. The name first appears in a parchment of 1383 in the State Archive of Varallo, which mentions an Alpe Carchoffeni: in those same years the Walser settled the alp, turning a herdsmen's stop into a permanent village. The arms show a rocky three-peaked mountain and, in chief, a black eagle gripping a piece of meat in its talons.
The torbe, timber farm buildings from the village's foundation, show how people built up here. On 28 December 1863 a fire razed a third of the houses, in the upper part of the village: those destroyed were rebuilt entirely in stone, and two that escaped the flames were clad in stone, keeping their timber frame inside, still visible: the masked torbe. The Frasso del vote survives too, an ash over two hundred and fifty years old, noted by an English traveller in a mid-nineteenth-century chronicle.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Carcoforo
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
