Le Miniere di Pestarena

Gold built a second Macugnaga in the mountains above the fields. At Pestarena, a hamlet on the road up the Anzasca Valley, mines were worked from the Middle Ages — tradition even claims Roman or Celtic origins — where captains, feuding families and hundreds of miners pursued the metal until the twentieth century.

Why it matters

The Pestarena mines are among the oldest documented industrial sites in the Ossola. The municipal account opens with a peace treaty of 1291 signed at Armenzello (today Saas Almagell) that already speaks of skilled, hard-bargaining miners ranging from the Anzasca over the passes towards Alagna — evidence that an organised mining community existed here by the late thirteenth century. Extraction continued across seven centuries: through the violent lordship of Facino Cane's family in the early 1400s, the long and, by the account given, unskilful stewardship of the Borromeo family, and the eighteenth-century concessions of captain Bartolomeo Testoni, whose workings at Campioli were prosperous enough that he gifted a gilded wooden frame depicting the Adoration of the Magi to Macugnaga's parish church, where it can still be connected to that building's furnishing.

At peak, in the era the naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure recorded, the Macugnaga mines employed up to a thousand workers — a remarkable figure for an alpine valley — and the workings at Pestarena and Borca shaped local life until the mines closed in the twentieth century.

What to notice

• The setting above the hamlet. Pestarena sits on the valley road on the slope where the gold veins ran closest to the surface; the hillsides above hold the adits and spoil of centuries of digging.
• The link to the parish church: a gilded Adoration of the Magi frame donated by mining captain Bartolomeo Testoni ties the industrial history to Macugnaga's religious art.
• The miners' valley: place names such as Campioli and the wider Pestarena–Borca corridor record the geography of extraction described in the municipal history.
• The wider gold network: the valley's other mines show how extraction shaped several settlements in Macugnaga.

Context and history

The chronicle assembled by the municipality reads like the history of the valley in miniature. Tradition credits the Celts or Romans with the first workings, and with the discovery of the nearby Monte Moro pass. The 1291 treaty shows miners as an established presence on both sides of the border. In the fifteenth century the condottiere Facino Cane's family took rational control of the mines, grew rich, and fortified the Hospice of the Morghen; in 1425 the exasperated people of the valley — the Anzaschini — stormed the forts, killed the garrison and seized a quantity of gold. The Borromeo family then received the concession from Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti, holding it until the end of the eighteenth century, when the engineer captain Bartolomeo Testoni took over and worked the Campioli ore profitably. Saussure, visiting in that era, noted that Testoni's mine was called the Cava del Pozzone, that surface ore had proven richer than the deeper seams, and that most owners besides Testoni were trying to sell. General reference histories add that over 50 kilometres of tunnels were eventually driven for gold-bearing pyrite, with extraction continuing into the twentieth century and ceasing in 1961.

The former workings are now part of the valley's protected industrial heritage.