For centuries the hamlet was home to shepherds and flocks of sheep, and during the Resistance it was a place of transformation for around 200 twenty-year-olds who, having left as farmers, students and artisans from all over Italy, became partisans and descended into the valley to fight for the liberation of Italy from Nazi-Fascism. Among them were Duccio Galimberti, Dante Livio Bianco, Giorgio Bocca and Nuto Revelli.
After a long period of depopulation, in 2006 the Fondazione Nuto Revelli decided to acquire and recover it in order to create and make available to the community, schools and the general public a physical and dynamic place-witness of a double memory: that of the partisan war and that of rural life in the mountains.
Thanks to the procurement of the necessary economic resources (Piedmont Region Lr. 4/00, Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRC, Fondazione CRT) the hamlet has been reconstructed with an innovative and sustainable architectural project, harmoniously inserted in the landscape according to the criteria of the International Restoration Charter and using local raw materials, created by a group of architects formed spontaneously around Aldo and Giovanni Barberis, composed of Valeria Cottino, Dario Castellino and Daniele Regis.
Paraloup is now an open-air laboratory for a sustainable return to life, culture and work in the mountains, a return guided by the awareness and sensitivity to the historical memory of the people who inhabited this place, which hosted a very special form of Resistance, a “community Resistance”, and which today interprets this vocation in its huts in its strongly hybrid, experimental and multidisciplinary nature.
Restaurant and café, guesthouses
Museum of Tales and Anello Forte Lab
Baita Barberis
Open-air theatre at high altitude
Baita Perona
Partisan trails
© Copyright – Rifugio Paraloup Impresa Sociale SRL
Località Paraloup – 12010 Rittana (CN) | cell. +39.349.6397386| e-mail: info@paraloup.it | PEC: rifugioparaloup@legalmail.it
amministrazione trasparente
photo credits: Visual Crew, Andrea Abello, Alessandro Ottenga
