On the mountains along the Italian Swiss border between Val d’Ossola, the northernmost province of Piedmont, and the Valais canton, there is a small beautiful nature park, the Veglia Devero Park. The two large valleys of Veglia and Devero are surrounded with peaks over 3,000 metres high. The main feature of the area is water, water everywhere, to quench the thirst of men and animals, make the soil fertile and the vegetation lush, but it also digs deep gorges, ravines and gullies. In this gentle and, at the same time, awesome environment, man has fought a long arduous battle for over a hundred years. One of the last characters of this epic tells the story of the hard life of the mountain spalloni, smugglers who used to carry forty kilos of goods on their backs along secret gorges and across alpine passes, between precipices and risking avalanches, over the border between Switzerland and Italy and vice versa.