17. Stoppani's Maloggia
In 1880 a geologist pointed to the Maloja Pass as the place where the ice began its descent towards the Val Bregaglia.
→ Read all of Stoppani's passages on erratic boulders
In 1880 Antonio Stoppani, geologist and author of Il Bel Paese, published L'Era neozoica, the volume of the Geologia d'Italia (Milan, Vallardi) devoted to the ancient glaciers. In it he describes how the ice shaped the Italian Alps and the plain: moraines, hills, lakes, boulders.
The erratic boulder appears in it as a solved riddle. For generations no one had understood how a granite from the Valtellina could have “flown over the abyss of Lake Como” and come to rest on the mountains of the opposite shore. The answer was the ice, which filled valleys and lakes and stretched “like a bridge” between the peaks and the plain. When the glacier withdrew, it “went back towards its native peaks” and left the boulders where they lay. Stoppani calls them “ancient exiles from their native summits”.
The Maloja appears in it under the Italian name of the time. Describing the basin of the Adda, Stoppani mentions the Val Bregaglia, “which reaches as far as the Maloggia, which separates it from the Upper Engadine”. Further on, on J. M. Ziegler's map of the Upper Engadine, he reconstructs the path of the ice: “Starting with the great glacier of the Mera, one sees it set out from the Maloggia Pass and descend, down and down, through the Bregaglia valley, flanked or crossed throughout by old lateral and terminal moraines”. At Chiavenna that glacier joined the Splügen glacier and descended into Lake Como. One of its branches passed through the Val Menaggio and reached Lake Lugano. In 1875, on the hills around Lugano, Stoppani recognised among the erratic boulders “the green granite, coming from the Engadine, carried all the way there by the glacier of the Mera”.
From the pass to the city, along the valley: this is the journey of the stones. Souvenir di montagna travels it in reverse. First Lugano, then the Maloja.
Source: Antonio Stoppani, Geologia d'Italia, Parte seconda: L'Era neozoica, Milan, F. Vallardi, 1880, pp. 40, 51–52, 77, 87.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Antonio Stoppani, Geologia d'Italia, Parte seconda: L'Era neozoica, Milan, Francesco Vallardi, 1880, engraved frontispiece.