Hikes near Turin, within 130 km

Ten hikes within 130 km of Turin, from the Valle Gesso to Monte Avic, from the Val Ferret facing Mont Blanc to the Belvedere Glacier below Monte Rosa.

Turin has the Alps on its horizon, and on clear days the ring of peaks that closes off the plain is visible from many of the city's streets. Within 130 kilometres you can reach valleys that could hardly be more different: the Maritime Alps to the south, the Aosta Valley to the north with Mont Blanc at its head, and to the north-east the valleys of the Ossola and Monte Rosa. This page gathers our hikes within that radius, from walks of a few hours to two-day circuits.

In the Aosta Valley we have the Monte Avic nature park, with Rifugio Barbustel and the ten-lakes loop, the Rutor valley with its waterfalls and Rifugio Deffeyes, and two terraces facing Mont Blanc: Monte Fortin with Rifugio Elisabetta Soldini in the Val Veny, opposite the Miage Glacier, and Rifugio Bertone with the Testa della Tronche in the Val Ferret. To the south, in the upper Valle Gesso, the hike to the Valasco and Questa huts follows the military mule tracks of Valscura; to the north-east, Rifugio Zamboni Zappa leads to the foot of Monte Rosa's 4,000-metre peaks, above the Belvedere Glacier. The list is completed by the Antrona lakes circuit, Cima di Morissolo above Lake Maggiore and, just across the Swiss border, the Orny Glacier and the Cabane du Trient.

Good to know

The upper Valle Gesso carries the marks of two overlapping histories. In 1857 the royal hunting reserve of Valdieri and Entracque was founded, and the hunting lodge on the Pian del Valasco, now a mountain hut, was built for Victor Emmanuel II's chamois hunts; later, between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, the army built roads and mule tracks here for the defences along the French border, and some of them were used in June 1940. Sources disagree on the date of each individual track, but walking through Valscura it is easy to recognise the dry-stone walls and regular hairpins of people building for military use.

Monte Avic, for its part, was the first nature park in the Aosta Valley, established in 1989 in the upper valley of the Chalamy stream, partly to protect its forests of mountain pine, a conifer that is rare in the region. And from Rifugio Zamboni Zappa you look up at the east face of Monte Rosa, on whose crest, at Punta Gnifetti, the CAI's Capanna Regina Margherita has stood since 1893: at 4,554 metres, it is considered the highest building in Europe.