Val Grande

The Val Grande is the Alps running in reverse. For centuries this knot of gorges and 2,000-metre ridges between the Ossola valleys and Lake Maggiore was worked to the bone — dozens of alpeggi grazed to the last blade, forests logged down wooden sluices and iron cableways, charcoal smoke on every slope. Then, in June 1944, the Nazi-fascist rastrellamento swept the valleys, burned the summer farms and shot the partisans sheltering there, and the mountain economy never came back. The forest closed over the terraces and mule roads, and when Italy sought a national park to embody wilderness in 1992, it chose not a remnant of untouched nature but this: the largest re-wilded emptiness in the Alps, an abandonment turned monument.

Inside there are no roads at all. Cicogna, a hamlet of a few dozen souls at the end of a thread of tarmac, is the "capital"; beyond it the park's interior is gorges — the Rio Valgrande and Val Pogallo cut slots of white granite and jade pools — crossed by paths that dwindle to routes, marked on maps with the park's own honesty gradings. The old heart is In La Piana, a restored alp deep in the middle where an unstaffed bivouac and a summer warden keep the only lights. Wolves came back on their own in the 2010s; chamois hold Monte Zeda's crest, where the view runs from Monte Rosa to the lake.

The park is equally frank about risk: this is terrain that punishes improvisation — water is scarce on the ridges, escape routes are long, and the rescue statistics are quoted in the visitor centres without embarrassment. The gentle version exists on the rim: Pian Cavallone above Intragna, Monte Faiè over the lake, and the Val Vigezzo villages along the northern edge, where the blue Vigezzina-Centovalli railway rattles between Domodossola and the painters' town of Santa Maria Maggiore.

What's worth knowing before you go

From Verbania, roads end at Cicogna and at the Pian Cavallone trailheads; from the north, the Vigezzina rail serves Malesco and Santa Maria Maggiore, with Val Loana the walk-in. The classic interior crossing to In La Piana is a committing two-day loop — carry a real map, tell someone, and treat the "faint path" symbols as promises. Late May–June and September–October are the seasons; summer brings haze and violent afternoon cells.

The connoisseur's approach is by that little railway: Santa Maria Maggiore (spare an hour for its chimney-sweeps' museum — the valley exported spazzacamini to all of Europe, and their December gathering fills the streets with brushes), then over Val Loana into the silence, and polenta at Cicogna's lone osteria on the way out.