Giro dei Masi

The Masi Circular Trail links the farm hamlets from which Andalo grew, through meadows and lanes beneath the Brenta Dolomites. The historic settlement pattern reflects how the Paganella plateau village took shape.

Why it matters

Most Alpine resorts grew from a single church and a handful of houses. Andalo did not: the official destination portal for the Paganella plateau presents the giro dei masi as one of the village's defining experiences, an itinerary through "the meadows, the view over the Brenta, the houses of the past". The masi were the original building blocks of the community — clusters of farmhouses and working buildings from which, as the regional trail portal Sentres puts it, the village originated. The route follows the settlement pattern itself, connecting the places from which the village formed.

What to notice

The modern village is compact, while older masi are distinguished by thick plastered walls, broad wooden balconies once used for hay and corn, and arched doorways at stable level. Maso Pegorar and Maso Doss still stand apart from the built-up town, on higher ground above the basin. Their separation evokes Andalo when its fourteen hamlets were distinct clusters among fields and woodland. The Brenta group and the pyramid of Piz Galin form the surrounding skyline.

Context and history

Andalo is a village of medieval origin, and its early geography was defined by subdivision into fourteen masi: Bortolon, Cadin, Casanova, Clamer, Doss, Fovo, Ghezzi, Melchiori, Monech, Pegorar, Perli, Ponte, Roni and Toscana. Each was a working farm unit with its own land, and for centuries the community lived in these scattered groups rather than in one centre. Only in the twentieth century, and above all from the 1950s onward, did tourism development draw the hamlets together into the single resort town visible today; most of the old boundaries disappeared under new construction, which is precisely why the masi that still stand apart — Pegorar and Doss, visibly detached on the basin's rim — carry such evidential weight. The circular trail formalises this history by linking surviving masi around the village.