The itinerary starts from the sports field of Facen, where it is possible to leave the car, and then heads towards the small square, crossed by car just before. In a niche, carved from the wall of a house, there is a fresco depicting the Madonna del Rosario with St. Rocco and St. Peter; the shrine was erected by the inhabitants of Facen in 1836, as a thank you for having escaped the cholera epidemic that struck the Feltrino those years.
From here, you take the steep Via Anconetta, finding at a fork the Sass del Diaol, a porphyry boulder on whose surface were engraved, at an unspecified time, overlapping crosses. Continuing westward with more moderate slopes, you reach a capital dedicated to the Madonna with Child, depicted with Saints Vito and Modesto.
Here, you maintain the direction of travel, then leaving the paved road at a curve. You continue along the old mule track that was once used with wooden sledges (musse) to transport loads of hay, firewood, or foliage down to the valley. Proceeding uphill, on rather uneven ground, you go through a forest with some large black hornbeams, spared from periodic cuts for the recovery of firewood. In this stretch, you encounter a votive shrine in an evident state of decay, built against a rock projection, at the fork with a path that climbs to Santa Susanna. A slight depression, bordered by a dry stone wall, perhaps represents a water collection source, to which devotees attributed special properties, as was the case for that of Santa Susanna. In fact, this precedes slightly a second shrine, which is in poor condition, in which you can see a main niche with two internal windows and a roof covered with stone slabs.
You continue to follow the main road uphill until you arrive in a more open and grassy environment, at a crossroads of roads and paths. Our route now joins the paved road, which descends towards the settlement of Fiere.
For the return, you head directly towards the church of Facen, pleasantly distracted by the panorama of the Prealps, the Valbelluna, the mountains of the Alpago, and the Dolomites. Staying along the main road, you notice some examples of typical rural dwellings and several wooden crucifixes, a sign of widespread popular devotion. The locality is called Venezia Secca. Just below, we notice some remnants of traditional agricultural landscape, where vines are interspersed with white willows and the meadows are dotted with fruit trees. Near a recently arranged area, there is a fountain fed by a stream and a large washhouse; this place must have been the center of social life for women of the past, who went there to do the lissia.
You continue towards the village, encountering another stone fountain and returning to the point from which you started.
DEEPENING ON... The landscape we see
It seems incredible that about 200 million years ago, where the Dolomites are today, there was a sea. Then, due to the gradual convergence of the African and Eurasian continents, this sea slowly disappeared. Just as slowly, the layers of sediment, now petrified, were pushed upward by a few thousand meters and, in some cases, overturned, bent, and fractured. The complete emergence, which occurred about 15 million years ago, marked the birth date of the mountains and the beginning of the modeling phase. This territory, influenced in the Quaternary by several glaciations, retains traces only of the last one, as each of them erased the effects of the previous ones. During the last glaciation, the Piave Glacier covered the valley floor up to over 1000 meters high, leaving the mountain ridges and the summit of Monte Avena exposed. The final retreat of the glaciers, which occurred about 10,000 years ago, left us with rounded and smoothed shapes, like Monte Aurin, the saddle of Croce d’Aune, and the Valbelluna, with its steep sides. Subsequently, the landscape was reshaped by waterways, which carved narrow valleys and filled the valley floor with deposits, making it flat.
