Carlo pasta

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Carlo Pasta (born November 5, 1822 in Mendrisio ; † November 5, 1893 there ) was a Swiss doctor and politician . From 1875 to 1878 he was a Catholic-Conservative member of the National Council . He promoted tourism in Mendrisiotto in the southernmost part of the canton of Ticino and enabled the construction of the Monte Generoso railway, which opened in 1890 .

biography

His ancestors originally came from Gallarate in Lombardy and settled in Mendrisio in 1776 , where they rose to the local bourgeoisie. Carlo Pasta was the eldest of four sons of the landowner Feliciano Pasta and Marianna Bianchi. He studied first at the Academy in Como and then at the University of Pavia , where he graduated in medicine in 1848 and surgery in 1850 . He then worked as a doctor in Milan and Mendrisio, where he helped contain a cholera epidemic in 1854/55 . In 1855 he moved to Brig in the canton of Valais to work as a mine doctor. There he came into contact with the flourishing tourism and alpinism . When he returned to Mendrisio in 1864, he found that his hometown also had to benefit from it and had to be developed for tourism.

Pasta, a lieutenant colonel in the medical forces, invested his fortune in building a hotel in Bellavista, about halfway between Mendrisio and the summit of Monte Generoso . In order to facilitate the construction work in this remote area, he had an old mule track converted into a road and a brick kiln built next to the construction site . After three years of construction, the Albergo Monte Generoso-Bellavista was able to be opened in the presence of numerous journalists and officials. Carlo Pasta worked closely with his brother Bernardino, who had another hotel built in Mendrisio in 1869. Together they strove to make Monte Generose an important climatic health resort .

The distinguished guests could reach Pastas Hotel on mules or by litter , but this was inconvenient. For this reason, he submitted a license application to the Federal Council in 1874 for the construction of a standard-gauge mountain railway from Mendrisio via Bellavista to Monte Generoso. The calculated costs turned out to be too high, which is why he gave up the project for the time being. After 1857 and 1872 unsuccessfully as a National Council had a candidate, Pasta joined the House of Representatives election in 1875 again for the Catholic Conservatives and was in Constituency Ticino-South selected. He represented them for three years and waived re-election in 1878, and in 1887 failed to run again.

In 1886, Pasta founded the Società anonima del Monte Generoso , which received a new concession to build a mountain railway, this time in the form of a narrow-gauge rack railway from Capolago . After 16 months of construction, the nearly nine-kilometer line was opened on June 4, 1890. At this point in time, Pasta had two more accommodations built at the mountain station, the Kulm and Vetta hotels. The intermediate stop Bellavista, however, was not at his hotel, but a few hundred meters away. In order to make the arrival and departure even more convenient for his guests, he commissioned the construction of the Bellavista tramway , which began operating on September 1, 1891. Pasta died of a stroke on his 71st birthday while driving up Monte Generoso . A street in Mendrisio is named after him, and a memorial in the cemetery also commemorates him.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Luca Montagner: Carlo Pasta e la passione per il Generoso. (PDF) Giornale del Popolo , April 27, 2018, accessed on October 22, 2019 (Italian).
  2. ↑ Background information. (PDF; 327 kB) Ferrovia Monte Generoso , 2017, accessed on October 22, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Tramway Bellavista (TB) In: discontinued-bahnen.ch by Jürg Ehrbar, accessed on October 22, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Pasta, Carlo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss politician and doctor
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1822
PLACE OF BIRTH Mendrisio
DATE OF DEATH November 5, 1893
Place of death Mendrisio