Monte Menna mountain festival

The fifty-eighth edition, on Sunday 2 August 2026, followed the usual pattern. The Pro Loco's programme and the one published by La Voce delle Valli agree: mass at 11 am near the cross, then lunch at the bivouac with the group's barbecue and polenta cunsada, music and the return to Zorzone; at the bivouac there is a bar and food service, and from 9 am a helicopter service, up and down, to be booked with the Pro Loco on 0345 95541. The group warns that it declines all responsibility for accidents to hikers during the festival.

The times of the climb are those of the 2025 edition, the fifty-seventh, on Sunday 3 August:

The festival is held at the group's bivouac, below the Cima di Menna, at the head of the Val Carnera. CAI Bergamo lists it as Bivacco Palazzi Gerolamo, at 2,095 metres, managed by the M.A.G.A. group of Zorzone: the winter room is always open, with beds and a fireplace, while the hut opens at the members' request. OpenStreetMap marks it at 2,005 metres as «Bivacco Maga – Palazzi», and the Pro Loco calls it the «rifugio M.A.G.A.».

M.A.G.A. stands for Menna, Arera, Grem and Alben, the four peaks around the basin. According to the history published by the MAGA Skymarathon association, the group was born in the mid-1960s in Zorzone from a few friends who decided to cross the four peaks in a single day: fifteen set off and seven made it. In 2024 the group's volunteers put up more than forty signs at seventeen points of the Menna paths, up to 2,000 metres, with funding from CAI Bergamo's trails commission.

The editions are counted year by year and let you trace the origins: the forty-eighth was on 7 August 2016, the fifty-fourth on 7 August 2022, the fifty-sixth on 4 August 2024, the fifty-eighth on 2 August 2026. Counting back, the numbering leads to the late 1960s, a few years after the group was founded. The date is always the first Sunday of August, as CAI's page on the bivouac also notes.

In 2016 the programme was almost identical to today's: departure from Zorzone at 8 am, arrival at the bivouac at 10.30, mass at 11, barbecue at noon and return at 3 pm; back then, in case of bad weather, the festival was postponed to a date to be set.

The path is CAI 234, which starts in Zorzone, with the car park in via Colombi indicated by CAI, climbs through the woods of the Val Carnera, passes the Mattuida farmstead at about 1,470 metres and reaches the bivouac across meadows; the Cima di Menna, 2,300 metres, is just above, along the ridge. From the village to the bivouac there are about a thousand metres of ascent and two and a half hours of walking, those of the festival programme and of the Gulliver and Diska route descriptions; as the crow flies the bivouac is about 2.5 kilometres from the Zorzone church.

It is a hiking path, graded E in the Cima di Menna page: nothing technical, but a climb that needs fit legs. In August in Zorzone the ERA5 averages give minimums of about 12 °C and maximums of 22 °C, and the bivouac is a thousand metres higher: a jacket in the rucksack is useful even in sunshine.