Ornavasso

Ornavasso sits on the Toce river just upstream from Gravellona, where the valley narrows toward the southern threshold of the Val Grande. The quarries worked the right bank of the Ossola valley opposite Candoglia, and their stone traveled well beyond the commune: besides the Milan cathedral, it went into the facade of the Certosa di Pavia and the Octagon of the Duomo di Pavia, a supply line running from the fourteenth century onward. The town's frazione, Migiandone, formed part of the same Walser settlement, colonists from the Simplon who kept a German dialect alive here into the late nineteenth century, longer than in any Walser community further up the Ossola.

The ground beneath the town has its own older history: two pre-Roman necropolises, Celtic and Italic, with burials spanning the second century BC to the first century AD. Above the centro, the devotional life of the upper Toce climbed the hillside, and in 1944 that same high ground sheltered soldiers and then partisans of the Valtoce division, in the brief Allied-recognised partisan state that held the upper valley that year. A quarry town, a language outpost, and a wartime redoubt turn out to be the same few square kilometers, stacked in time rather than spread across it.