In the Italian Alps the Viganella sun has gone out

The sun went out in Viganella, a small town nestled in the Alps, in the Italian region of Piedmont. In reality what was broken was an artificial sun, a mirror that reflected the star, placed to provide light in the three winter months in which the country is left in darkness due to the shadow of the mountains.

Its almost 300 inhabitants celebrated the traditional Candelaria festival with even more joy, on 4 February, when the sun reappears in Val d’Ossola, after 83 days in which they could not count on the artificial sun created by Pier Franco Midali’s stroke of geniusmayor of the city from 1990 to 2000.

In 1999 Midali had the idea of ​​placing a mirror on the mountain to recreate the sun between November 11 and February 2, when the city remains without electricity, and It took seven years to make that idea a reality that to many seemed crazy or too ambitious.

No one in Italy had ever built a mirror of this type and Midali searched for a long time for a technician willing to undertake the undertaking. Finally he found the engineer Emilio Barlocco, who had already designed software for the movement of mirrors synchronized with the sun to illuminate the entrance to the tunnels of the Turin-Savona motorway.

The mirror weighs 11 tons and has a reflecting surface of 40 m2 and settled on the slope of one of the mountains surrounding Viganella.

Using a computer system, the mechanism rotates daily, so as to reflect sunlight with an intensity of 70% onto Piazza Viganella, thus bringing the Alpine town out of darkness.

Midali explains to EFE that the mirror stopped working and the municipality’s version “is that there was an atmospheric discharge and probably a lightning strike must have burned and altered some electronic components that “Now they should be replaced”but at the moment this has not been done.

“The artificial sun in Viganella didn’t work and it’s a shame”, says the former mayor, specifying that the mirror is not only “useful in the winter period, because it brings the sun to the church squarebut also in summer for tourists because it is possible to control it from the town square with the computer and it is also possible to turn it on.

“Tourists leave satisfied because they see the unnatural phenomenon of having two suns in the sky, which is a very strange fact, and also beautiful, so it is a tourist and promotional attraction for the area. This is why we must make sure to solve correctly.” immediately, as soon as possible.”

Midani assures that his revolutionary idea helps above all the elderly people of the country, “because it is logical that someone who can move takes a walk in the woods or goes by car to places where it is sunny, but the elderly who cannot move for the whole day ‘winter, They have the opportunity to see it.”

“Even if it is not a hot sun, from a psychological point of view it is an advantage for the mood to see the sun even during the winter period,” he says.

It was a girl from Huelva, Spain, Alba Fontenla Martín, a student at the Adersa II Rural Public School, in Cortelazor, the one in charge of pressing the button that turned on the giant mirrorsince the Andalusian city is twinned with Viganella and participated in the event.

It made headlines all over the world and a delegation from the Norwegian city of Rjukan even came to the city to copy the idea and eventually installed three of them and, with the sun out, the neighbors fear that everyone will forget about Viganella .

EFE Agency