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Maloja
1'815 m
Graubünden
The Maloja Pass, at 1,815 metres, links the Engadine with the Val Bregaglia and on down to Chiavenna in Italy.
1'815 m
Graubünden
The Maloja Pass, at 1,815 metres, links the Engadine with the Val Bregaglia and on down to Chiavenna in Italy.
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DESCRIPTION
The Maloja Pass, at 1,815 metres, links the Engadine with the Val Bregaglia and on down to Chiavenna in Italy. Its great oddity is its shape: from the Engadine there is no climb at all. The high lake-plateau simply runs out, and the road tips over the edge and plunges down some twenty-two hairpins toward Italy, while the pass itself marks the divide between the basins of the Inn and the Po. Just above it, beneath Piz Lunghin, lies one of Europe's rare triple watersheds: rain falling here parts toward three seas – the North Sea by way of the Rhine, the Black Sea by way of the Inn and the Danube, and the Adriatic by way of the Po. The infant Inn itself rises in a little lake below the peak.
For all its modest height, the Maloja has long drawn artists. Nietzsche spent seven summers writing in the Engadine just up the lakes at Sils Maria, and the painter Giovanni Segantini settled here in 1894 and made the pass his studio until his death in 1899; he lies buried beside the little white church at Maloja. The valley below has a rougher past, too: from the early 19th century well into the 20th, smuggling food, tobacco and drink over the border was a valuable livelihood for the people of the Bregaglia and the Engadine. Low enough to stay open even in winter, the Maloja is the quiet hinge between the Romansh north and the Italian south.
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