Let the Sun Shine In!

Viganella, a sun-deprived village in the Italian Alps has come up with a novel solution to fix the problem - by installing a giant mirror on the opposite side of the valley!

Viganella's problem is that it was built at the bottom of a very steep-sided Alpine valley, right up against the Swiss border.

The southern side of the valley is so sheer that on November 11th the sun disappears behind the mountains and does not re-appear until February 2nd.

Not a single ray of sunlight falls on Viganella in the weeks between.

"It's like Siberia," one of the village's nearly 200 residents has said.

However, the south-facing slopes to the north do get sunshine just a few hundred metres above the village. So the mirror was mounted on the mountainside to reflect sunlight into the village's main piazza.













Your "illuminating" scribe;
Allan W Janssen