Look toward the grand beige stone building featuring massive arched ground floor windows and a highly ornate gabled roof perched right against the water. You just crossed the Middle Bridge to get here, and now you are looking at Hotel Les Trois Rois.
This is one of the oldest luxury hotels in Europe. In the late nineteenth century, lavish rooms just like these were the ultimate staging grounds for daring adventurers. Imagine the scene. Wealthy explorers sitting behind those pristine windows, drinking tea and plotting impossible expeditions.
One such adventurer was the American mountaineer William Auguste Coolidge. While many climbers focused locally, Coolidge might have sat in a grand parlor here, mapping out an expedition far to the south in the wild Maritime Alps to conquer a beast of a mountain called Monte Matto.
Monte Matto is a spectacular peak rising 3,097 meters into the sky. Its shape is entirely unmistakable. It forms a massive, asymmetrical pyramid jutting out of the landscape, complete with a very prominent side tooth on its ridge.
To climb it, you had to understand the stone itself. The mountain crest acts as a geological dividing line. The east side is dominated by granitoid gneiss... a type of tough, banded rock forged under extreme heat... speckled with deep red garnets. Meanwhile, the west face is a chaotic blend of migmatites, another partially melted rock form, all born from the ancient Argentera crystalline massif.
Coolidge wanted that summit. On August 14, 1879, he and his guides, Christian and Ulrich Almer, finally pulled it off, completing the first official ascent. They tackled the northwest face, starting from Sant Anna di Valdieri. It was a grueling trek through the Meris valley, past deep alpine lakes, navigating endless, treacherous boulder fields. They first reached the East peak, the easiest to access, before traversing a massive six hundred meter ridge to stand on the Central peak, the absolute highest point.
Even today, climbers making that challenging two day journey share the rugged trails with the true locals of the mountain. As you hike up through the protected park area, you will regularly spot marmots darting between rocks, agile chamois... a nimble mountain goat native to Europe... and massive ibexes watching from the highest, most dangerous crags.
It takes an immense amount of grit to tackle a peak like Monte Matto. Yet those raw, terrifying alpine adventures often began with a map spread out on a velvet table in an opulent room exactly like the ones right here.
Picture those daring mountaineers, and then let us head over to the Jewish Museum of Switzerland.
