Cima Rest

The barns of Cima Rest are rural buildings located on the plateau at an altitude of about 1300 m.

They are located in the middle of the alpine pasture and structured in such a way as to contain in a single building the basic functions for the life of the herdsman: on the lower floor the stable for the livestock, the house for the farmer, on the upper floor the storage for forage and outside the woodshed. Historical research, begun after World War II, dates this building type to the 7th century, attributing it to the traditions of the Goths or Lombards.[6]

This building typology can still be found not only in Val Vestino but also in Piedmont in the Maritime Alps Park, between the Gùie basin and the Valle Gesso, precisely in Sant'Anna di Valdieri, located on the border with France. In fact, this area preserves archaic rural landscape features thanks to some baite built with rye thatched roofs placed at the foot of large rock outcrops.

The Valvestino Ethnographic Museum is located in Cima Rest and collects agricultural tools, utensils, and furnishings related to rural life.

In 1969, a surface fossil deposit of some scientific importance was discovered by researchers from the Brescia Civic Museum of Natural Sciences at Cima Rest, in the Alvezza locality, near the alpine pasture, part of a geologic formation, called the Zorzino Limestone, of Mesozoic age, dating from approximately 220 million years ago. The fossil fauna investigated consists of shrimp and fish that lived in ancient Mesozoic seas. Special features of these fossils are their preservation with their complete morphology highlighting anatomical details.[7] Prominent among the various findings is the discovery in sediments of the Norian age of a Paralepidotus ornatus, a fossil fish specimen 600 millimeters long now preserved at the Brescia Civic Museum of Natural Sciences and dating precisely to the Norian stage, i.e., the Triassic period between 226 and 210 million years ago. Paralepidotus was a slow-moving fish, equipped with strong ganoid scales to defend itself from attackers equipped with teeth, lived near the seabed and fed mainly on mollusks.[8][9]

Researcher Fulvio Schiavone writes: "The first to be discovered in the late 1960s were holostean fishes belonging to the genera Paralepidotus and Pholidophorus, but later remains of flying fishes and single teeth detached from the jaws of predatory fishes, such as the genus Birgeria, were also identified. Also common are the jaws of Pseudodalatias, a cartilaginous fish, of which only the small jaw equipped with pointed teeth is known because it is bony in nature. Shrimps of the genera Antrimpos, Archeopalinurus,[note 2] Acanthinopus[note 3] and (Palaeo)dusa have also been found. Of interest are the Thylacocephala, arthropods recently discovered taxonomically in the Besano fossiliferous deposit, which lived undisturbed in the asphyxial seabed feeding on the remains of dead animals that had fallen down into the seabed. Among other novelties, problematic remains were also found that may correspond to the wing of a flying reptile of the Triassic and Jurassic rhamphorhynchus group."[7]

Other finds extracted from the rocks of Crune, a locality located near the Alvezza alpine pasture, between 1999 and 2006, consist of small fish, usually no larger than 11 centimeters, belonging to the group of Pholidophoriformes, better known as pholidophoridae. These small fish played an important role in the ecological chains of the ancient Triassic seas, as they were a source of food for all predatory fish. Apart from the Vestino Valley area, pholidophorids had previously been found only in a few other Italian and European localities: such as at Cene (Bergamo), Ponte Giurino (Bergamo) and Seefeld in Tirol (Austria).[10]

In fact, the presence of these fossils had already been detected in the last decades of the 1800s by the German geologist Karl Richard Lepsius. In the second half of the 19th century the Austrian Empire planned and financed within the Geologische Reichanstalt geological studies and research in southern Tyrol and Trentino in parallel with topographical surveys and the first cadastral maps. Between 1875 and 1878 Karl Richard Lepsius[11] carried out careful stratographic research, devoting several pages of his book to the geology of the Ledro Alps and the mountains south of Ampola with detailed studies of the upper dolomite of Alpo di Bondone, Valle Lorina, Val Vestino, and Monte Caplone. In his publication "Western South Tyrol," published in Berlin in 1878, Lepsius wrote: "The greater part of the Vestino Valley consists of main dolomites, the wild gorges of which are difficult to penetrate; on it lie the Rhaetian strata, severely faulted and pierced by the rigid dolomites. The irregular formation makes it difficult always to separate the lilodendron limestone[note 4] and dolomite from the underlying main dolomite; for the contorta-mergel are mostly discarded and crushed, and carried away by water on the dolomites. The broad plateau above Magasa, on which fresh green meadows and shrubs extend, we immediately recognize as Rhaetian in contrast to the rugged and almost completely barren dolomites: numerous blocks of lilodendrons, Terebratula gregaria, Aviceln, and Modiole immediately confirm our hypothesis; next to that, contorta-thone clays have been wrested from the water, in which we find the same Avicula contorta, Cyrena rhaetica, Cerithium hemes, Leda percaudata, Austrian Cardita[note 5] and others. Large quantities of fossils characteristic of these strata have been found. The strata descend from Caplone Pass to the south; the lilodendron limestones collapsed on the lower clays and were thrown south on the main dolomites. Houses on the upper meadows[note 6] are built with black lilodendron limestone. Toward the settlement of Magasa one descends on lilodendron limestone, an alternation of gray and black limestone, gray dolomite limestone, and white dolomite limestone. Below it lies, not very thick, impaled between jagged main dolomites, the contorta-mergel. From Magasa, head west across the plateau to Bondone and into the valley of the Chiese."[12]

There is also an astronomic observatory on the plateau, active since 1997.[13]