Stone Houses in Stone Valley

When in Rome, Do as the Romans do

The Aosta Valley of Italy is full of stones and rocks. Everywhere you look there are rocks, some grass, rocks, some trees, rocks, some snow, rocks. It's no surprise that rocks are the building material of choice. And why not? Stone doesn't burn, a great advantage for forest fires. Stone doesn't leak, and stone is resistant to rocks and avalanches falling down from the mountains above. It makes a lot more sense than building houses from glass.

No surprises there, until I noticed the roofs. The ROOFS are also made of stone shingles. The house in this picture is a great example. Stone shingles. My friends explained that stone shingles have been used for centuries. Italian mountain people invented an ingenious method of using freezing ice to make the shingles. Water was poured into a crack in granite rock. When the water froze at night, the ice expanded and broke the rock slab off from the main piece of granite.


Ingenious, don't you think? Well maybe not so much genius as common sense. For many centuries, mountain climbers in these mountains learned that they were in grave danger of rockfall every morning as the ice in the rocky cracks melted and let loose large rocks. Mountaineers learned early that they must start climbing at midnight or 2 AM to avoid the deadly rockfall that occurs nearly every summer morning. After dodging rocks for many years, someone finally realized they could use this natural phenomonen for a positive purpose: building their own houses.