Cervinia

The Story Behind the Place

The Valtournenche’s villages lived for centuries on what the mountain allowed: cattle, rye and the guides who first led strangers up the peaks. Its stone was the Matterhorn itself — the Gran Becca — and in the 1860s the valley’s stonemason Jean-Antoine Carrel raced the Englishman Edward Whymper for its summit. Whymper won from Zermatt on 14 July 1865, at the cost of four lives on the descent; Carrel reached the top by the Italian Lion ridge three days later, the first man up the mountain’s south side, and the valley has kept his name on its huts and streets ever since. Tourism followed the alpinists: the first refuges went up in the 1890s — the Casa Savoia hut of 1892 now rebuilt in the village as the alpinism museum — and in the 1930s the regime built a planned resort on the Breuil pastures, naming it Cervinia. The Plateau Rosà cableway, pushed across the glacier in stages and finished in 1961, was the engineering sensation of its age and made summer skiing on the Theodul a fact of European life; the modern Skyway-grade lifts and the link toward Zermatt’s Klein Matterhorn continue the story. Cervinia remains what it was built to be — Italy’s window onto the Matterhorn.