Icebox

The 19th-century Icehouse of Salbertrand, one of the few remaining natural icehouses (building and adjacent supply pond) in Piedmont, was once an important resource for mountain dwellers, considering the seasonal nature of work, complementary to agricultural activities.

At the beginning of the 1900s, some merchants from Oulx, gathered in a society, built the icehouse building to preserve the ice produced in winter in the adjacent artificial pond.

Exploiting the difference in height between the bed of the Rio Gorge and the edge of the lake, a room of 800 cubic meters was excavated, which, with the addition of some embankments outside, was almost completely buried. To protect the structure from summer heat, a layer of about a meter of soil was added, on which Scots pine trees were planted.

A smaller stone building, leaning against the front facade of the building and delimited by two wooden doors, served as an efficient airlock entrance that ensured the maintenance of cold inside the icehouse and provided protection from rain for the carters.

A wooden slide placed within a channel (culìs) dug along the descent between the lake and the icehouse was used to transfer the ice blocks.

Three windows, placed at different heights, were used for storing and removing ice.
An internal system of wooden scaffolding was designed to slow down the block coming from the outside, guiding it along the descent to prevent breakage.

At the time of sale, the ice blocks wrapped in wet jute cloths were placed on two-wheeled carts and taken to the railway station. Most of the product was loaded onto trains and sent to Turin, a small quantity went to the Upper Valley, for the first establishments frequented by tourists, and sometimes as far as Briançon.

During peak activity, between the early 1900s and World War I, the icehouse was emptied annually. When refrigeration machines appeared and factories were built to produce ice directly in the highest consumption areas, natural icehouses were almost completely abandoned.

In the final year of operation, the production of the Grand Bosco icehouse remained unsold and was preserved until the following winter, demonstrating the perfect thermal insulation of the building.