Bellano

The guide to Bellano's Orrido, an iron walkway bolted into the gorge walls above the rushing Pioverna, starts with a stream that ironworkers spent the 1500s and 1600s damming and channeling to smelt ore from the mines of Valsassina. You'll hear how a poet of the era still called the gorge horrendously ugly even as it drove the local economy, and how the 1700s brought a pink-marble staircase built for tourists rather than millworkers. It follows the gorge into the 1870s, when a cotton mill rose beside it to spin on the same harnessed water. Listen for the sound of the water before you look down at it.