Overview
Orange Flag of the Italian Touring Club
Usseglio stands 1,200 metres above sea level in the Viù Valley, on the alpine border with France, in a large plain overlooking beech forests and surrounded by mountains, many of which exceed 3000 metres. In winter, the town becomes the kingdom of Alpine skiing, while in summer it is popular for hiking, mountaineering, climbing and cycling. The area is crossed by the Stura stream, known locally as “La Chiara” for its clear waters, as well as the artificial lake of Malciaussià, formed following the construction of a dam in the 1920s and 1930s. The lake owes its unusual name to the term “mal ciaussia”, which in Italian means “badly shod”, probably due to the poor quality of the shoes used in ancient times by the locals or the “magari”, who used to take the livestock to pasture. Particularly interesting is the Civic Museum, which houses precious pre-Romanesque and Romanesque artefacts, as well as collections of local flora, fauna and minerals. The museum also holds important temporary exhibitions dedicated, for example, to the painters of Turin from the late 1800s, early 1900s. It is worth stopping at the Ancient Parish Complex, which boasts a church of medieval origin with an ancient cemetery behind it (chapel dated 1547) and a Romanesque bell tower; the New Parish, a sumptuous neo-baroque building; and Roccia dei Giochi, a boulder situated near Andriera, featuring engravings and petroglyphs dedicated to Jupiter, dating back to the Celtic era. The typical products of Usseglio include cheeses such as toma di Lanzo and other alpine varieties, biscuits such as torcetti from Lanzo and meliga, and salami from Turgia. The Festival of the Toma and of alpine cheeses is held on the two central weekends of July and is among the town’s most important events; the Festa della Neve (Snow Festival), in February, includes competitive and amateur snowshoeing; finally, the New Year's Eve Torchlight Procession in Pian Benot is led by ski instructors and open to all.
