Trip to the Vallemaggia, Ticino

A beautiful day trip from Locarno is the Vallamaggia (Maggia-TRal in German)..




The valleys around Locarno are groaning with hiking possibilities, and offer some of the most beautiful scenery in the whole canton – which means that trails can get a little overcrowded in the summer season. Val Verzasca and Valle Maggia both lead north from Locarno, while the gorgeous Centovalli runs west on one of the most scenic and dramatic train rides in the country. The small resort of Ascona lies a little southwest of Locarno, with the beautiful Isole di Brissago just offshore.

About 1.5km east of Locarno is the suburb of Tenero, standing at the head of the VAL VERZASCA, the southern end of which is blocked by the gigantic Verzasca Dam, scene of one of the world’s highest bungee-jumps (see “Listings” above). Buses run past the dam to Corippo, at the end of the lake behind, a beautiful cluster of old stone cottages crowned by a tall campanile; 3km north is Lavertezzo, whose claim to fame is perhaps the most-photographed bridge in Switzerland, a graceful seventeenth-century double arch that leaps from bank to island to bank. Many quieter trails head off into side valleys from Lavertezzo, while Verzasca itself cuts deeper and deeper for another 14km to Sonogno at the valley’s end, passing on the way through Brione, whose church boasts fourteenth-century Giotto-style frescoes.

The deeper, even more rugged gorge of the VALLE MAGGIA runs north from Locarno, very narrow in its initial stretches and only opening out further along around Gordevio. You’d do best to take a bus to Bignasco, 30km north of Locarno, where the valley divides into the Val Lavizzara leading northeast and the completely isolated Val Bavona heading northwest. Bignasco and Lavizzara link in with the walking tour of Alto Ticino described in the box on p.491. Bavona is truly wild, a strip of valley floor 10km long that rises 500m over its length and is hemmed in by sheer scarps on both sides. There are twelve rustic, crumbling hamlets in the valley, all without electricity save San Carlo, the last community of all, characterized by tall, narrow stone houses built by the valley’s sixteenth-century inhabitants.

excerpt from Switzerland Tourism

More impressions from Locarno Film Festival

Locarno Film Festival.. get some more impressions from the moving event

Locarno Video from the mini train

Locarno is quite busy during the Film Festival.. here you can see a short footage from the mini train..August 4th 2007

Locarno Film Festival 2007

the famous Film Festival in Locarno is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, the visit there was a great experience..the Grande Piazza, the heart of the town is the location of the big cinema,holding 7000 seats.. if you are not early enough (we fortunately gathered a seat but somewhere quite back) you might end up standing.. and the amount of people is enormous.. the main focus of the film festival is "substance" that means the quality of films is set quite high,the main issue being independent films and specialties for film-lovers all over the world, there are few "blockbusters" like The Bourne Ultimatum, but this is the European Premiere shown in Locarno. we visited the Grande Piazza on Thursday, seeing this very special movie:
J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster or: Drew Barrymore is a Cheeseburger
the film is produced in black and white. it shows several episodes of "usual" people trying to commit a crime but not successfully.. like two unemployed mid 50 men who try to kidnap a female teenager from a wealthy family.. but what they don't know is that the girl is suicidal and is trying to kill herself several times while being kept in thew men's house.. so they start to talk to her and help her to feel better..
it is a movie that tries to get rid of hollywood klischees of the perfect crime, nothing is perfect in this film as far as crime is concerned, everything goes wrong. it shows the human component, the people from the street trying to act like criminals
but being overtaken by the unpredictable happenings of life an their own emotions..

Face Recognition by my heritage

A great toy on the is the Free Recognition Software from myheritage where you can simply upload a picture of yourself and check out which celebrities you look like..


MyHeritage Face Recognition runs in 3 steps:


The digital photo (or scanned photo print) that you provide, is loaded



Face detection technology is applied to automatically detect human faces in your photo ( * )



Face recognition technology is applied to recognize the faces detected in the previous step


( * ) If faces are missed out in step 2, you can mark them manually using the Marker.
Recognizing faces is done by algorithms that compare the faces in your photo, with all faces previously known to MyHeritage Face Recognition, through photos and meta-data contributed by yourself and other users. So the more photos added to the system, the more powerful it becomes. If people in your photos are not recognized well, it is likely that MyHeritage.com has never encountered them before. By adding these photos to MyHeritage.com and annotating the people in the photo manually, MyHeritage.com will "learn" these faces and will be able to recognize them in future photos, even in different ages of the same person's life.

Note: the algorithms used by MyHeritage Face Recognition are likely to find relatives of people in your photo, due to the genetic-based facial similarities that exist between relatives. You can use this to form connections between people whom you never even knew were related.

Wandern am Arlberg

Ausgangspunkt: Formarin Alpe
Zielpunkt: Steinernes Meer
Länge (Start-Ziel): 8,5 km
Gehzeit: 3,5 - 4 Std.
Höhenmeter (Differenz): 350
Wegnummer: 601/ 62
Schwierigkeitsgrad: mittel
Routenführung: Rundweg
Kurzbeschreibung der Route: Bus bis Formarinalpe, von dort über das Steinerne Meer rund um den Formaletsch bis zur Freiburger Hütte und zurück zur Bushaltestelle
Kurze Beschreibung der Charakteristik: Anspruchsvolle besondere Wanderung über das "steinerne Meer" wo teilweise Trittsichereit erfor-derlich ist.
Infrastruktur: Bus, bewirtschaftete Alm, Schutzhütte
Erlebnishöhepunkt(e) Erlebnisleistung: Geologisches Wunderwertk, wo man verschiedene Fossilien - die durch Steinmänner gekenn-zeichnet sind - bewundern kann, die Geschichte der Ent-wicklung der Alpen klar und deutlich im Gestein geschrieben ist und wo man selber nach verschie-nen Formen der Fossilien suchen kann.
Einkehrmöglichkeiten: -