The bats are in the belfry

The dew is on the moor ...

there are no records of TomWaits ever visiting Magnano, but the lines of his most famous  ballad well  portray  the atmosphere that enfolds the visitor, once he crosses the Ricetto gate tower, for centuries crowded with bats, and is struck by the waves of  history that the stones and the shining Serra landscape narrate; and once, down the Old Washing Pool trail, he comes out in the dewy fields  of  the St. Secondo plain and beyond, in Carbunera, on the way to St. Grato.  We are in front of a real open-air  ethnographic museum , with the Ricetto cellars aligned along three parallel roads; the Congregation House, ancient seat of the Commune; the masere, dry walls that border all the trails; the remains of the Old Washing Pool; the bose, deep pits for  the irrigation of the vineyards.                                                                          

The route is equipped with several guide-boards that recount the history and traditions of the region and its civilization; it is like opening a book while walking, page after page, a new page after  a few hundred yards from the previous one.