ARCHITECTURE ROUTE
Giro dei Ciabot
Trail of the “Ciabot” (small houses with different uses)
 

You can cover this route: trekking riding a horse riding a bike with cross-country skis with snowshoes

difficulty: none Suggested period: all the year round, you can enjoy different emotions in the different seasons.

fotogallery

…Why did they build a house in such a place? … Why were windows so small? …Where did they took all those squared stones? These and other questions will occur to you when you will
see these buildings on your trail.

We opened this route only after a painstaking research in cooperation with several experts on building restoration, and after a very careful collection of interviews among people who “experienced” these buildings in their lives. Some of them have memories full of bitterness concerning the “ciabot”, since these ones are a memory of a very hard life, while other people remember them with nostalgia for the past and the good old values. On this trail you can find various building made with the dry wall technique, and realized with the Langa stones.

Small houses used occasionally as a shelter for the cattle alternate with independent houses, which are built in very steep and inhospitable places, sometimes. They bear witness to the past life of a different agricultural system that would be absolutely unsustainable nowadays.
The house facilities, such as wells and terracing works, through which some plots of land were made tillable (otherwise they would have been suitable only for grassland), and the complicated road system to reach the different allotments, are extremely interesting.

This trail is a due recognition of a way of living in and with an inhospitable and fascinating land; if you give the land your effort, you will be rewarded with great emotions.