Rifugio Vittorio Emanuele II
The main base hut for Gran Paradiso, the only 4000-metre peak lying entirely within Italy. Located above Pont in the Val Savaranche inside the Gran Paradiso National Park.
The Rifugio Vittorio Emanuele II — the main base hut for the Gran Paradiso normal route — is named after the first king of unified Italy (1820–1878), who in 1856 declared the upper Valsavarenche and Val di Cogne a royal hunting reserve to protect the dwindling population of Alpine ibex. The reserve became Italy's first national park in 1922; the ibex herd that survives in the Alps today, numbering some 30,000 animals, descends almost entirely from the population the king preserved.
The hut itself was built in 1884 by the Turin section of the CAI on the site of one of the king's hunting cabins; the original stone-and-wood building is preserved as a museum next door to the modern hut, which was opened in 1961 and extended in the 1980s. The present building is one of the largest huts in the Italian Alps, sleeping more than 100, and serves a steady stream of climbers on the Gran Paradiso voie normale — by some distance the easiest 4000er after the Breithorn-West, and the only one entirely within Italian territory. The walk-in from Pont in the Valsavarenche traverses some of the best ibex-watching country in the Alps; climbers leaving the hut at 3 a.m. routinely pass herds bedded down on the path.
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- Normal route via Rifugio Vittorio Emanuele IIF