The Contraband Trail and to Memory

It starts from the village of Baruffini, a hamlet of Tirano located on the border with Switzerland, to reach the locality of Sasso del Gallo and then continue and return to Baruffini. The route, equipped with signposts and information panels, is about 8.5 kilometers long, with an elevation gain of 450 meters. It is not particularly challenging but a minimum of training is needed.

To get hooked on smugglers' stories of chases and gunfights, you don't need to go to the movies or read a novel. Just walk the Sentiero del Contrabbando e alla Memoria (Smuggling and Memory Trail) that leads from the hamlet of Baruffini in Tirano to Sasso del Gallo. Until the 1960s, paths and mule tracks that carve through the mountains above Tirano were the scene of trafficking and clashes between "spalloni" and law enforcement officers. The former tried to transport goods from Swiss territory and then resell them on the black market while the latter tried to thwart this illegal trade.

The Path of Smuggling and to Memory was born in 2007 thanks to the initiative of some f inanciers of the Anfi Section of Tirano and some former smugglers who experienced the phenomenon of smuggling firsthand. It is a project that intends to tell what this illicit activity represented for the local population, along a historical period that lasted until the mid-twentieth century, in which so many families in Valtellina were unable to make a decent living. A situation that led many young people to devote themselves to this activity in order to improve their living conditions.