Chiesa dell'Immacolata e di San Bernardo di Mentone

It stands beside the rifugio Vioz, at about 3,535 metres above sea level, and this makes it the highest masonry church in Europe. The record has to be stated with its qualification, which is that of the source: masonry, precisely, because in absolute terms it is preceded by the chapel at the capanna Giovanni Gnifetti, on Monte Rosa.

It did not begin as a mountaineering curiosity. It was built in 1947 in memory of the victims of the Second World War, and is dedicated to the Immacolata and to Saint Bernard of Menthon.

The place has a memory of war older than the one the church commemorates: from this same side, across a small glacier, you reach the punta Linke, where a museum gathers the trenches and equipment of the First World War.