The Moraine Amphitheater: a journey through time and nature

Welcome to the Ivrea Morainic Amphitheater, not just a geographical area of Canavese, but the geological conformation of glacial origin among the best preserved on the entire planet!

Don’t you already feel part of a special place?

We little people were barely taking our first upright steps when, in the Quaternary period, all this began to form: and you are now here to discover it with us (or are thinking of coming here), to hear from those who live here how much beauty is hidden behind each hill, how much life is housed in the small moraine lakes, how much knowledge there is in each village or small town here.

Hills, lakes and biodiversity

The term amphitheater derives from the characteristic curved, “horseshoe” shape of the hills that make up the outer edge: imagine a large, almost quadrangular basin, inside of which, instead of there being water, there is plain. Not a monotonous plain: a plain dotted with micro-lakes (Viverone, Candia, Sirio, San Michele, Pistono, Nero, Campagna, Meugliano, Alice, Bertignano), peat bogs, huge erratic boulders, unusual rocky outcrops, minor hills, and natural and artificial watercourses that become ideal habitats for extraordinary biodiversity.

But who was the originator of such an intricate landscape, so varied and contained in only 530 sq. km ? (about 30 x 27 sq. km.)

A GLACIER, A HISTORY, A TERRITORY

It is all the work of an enormous glacier, the Balteo Glacier: more than 100 km long, up to 800 m thick and up to 3 km wide, it flowed from the Aosta Valley into the Canavese plain with the effect of a mammoth bulldozer, capable of piling up impressive amounts of debris in front of it and, at the same time, dragging everything it encountered along its path. Then, with alternating phases of melting and advancing, it continued to build hillsides and modify what had been done in the previous phase, until it arrived at the final result: time, nature and man did the rest.

Some lakes dried up, turning into peat bogs, the hillsides became covered with vegetation (also very different from area to area depending on the composition of the soil), man began to populate the most strategic places, near watercourses or on the heights for defensive purposes, to change the landscape but without ever distorting it: he did not dig holes, he did not level hills, he did not mortify nature.

AN AREA TO EXPERIENCE, A HERITAGE TO DISCOVER

If we have intrigued you a little, all that remains is to plan your days in Canavese to discover:

• Ivrea, with its Olivettian architecture and historic center on the banks of the Dora Baltea River;
• The myriad of small villages nestled in the hills, each with a church, a castle, a tower, a shrine, a museum, a gastronomic specialty;
• Carema vineyards cling to the mountain and Erbaluce vineyards gently sprawl over the hills, sometimes sloping down to the lakes;
• Lakes in which to swim, canoe and row, or simply take a boat ride;
• The many trails and paths for walking, mountain biking, and horseback riding;
• Our welcome, sometimes initially a bit coy, but then becoming warm and authentic