An important passageway in the 17th and 18th centuries, the many well kept roads in the Vanoise massif are an inheritance from the days of the salt and cheese trade between the Tarentaise, the Maurienne and the Piedmont regions.
The House of Savoy introduced a toll for the upkeep of the road surface and roadside walls. Two centuries later, after the Fréjus tunnel was cut and the international railway station of Modane went into operation, a new trade was born. Rice began to be imported from the regions of Piedmont, Vercelli, Novara in Italy and from Asia through the ports of Genoa and Marseille The pre-war rice epic has its monument, the "Rizerie des Alpes", a rectangular industrial edifice in the shape of a Greek temple, with sixteen ionic columns and two triangular pediments. It was built in 1929 by Italian industrialists Francesco Cattaneo and Guglielmo Gerardo, on the market place situated between the town centre and the Loutraz quarter. Attracted by low priced hydraulic energy to run their machinery, provided by the rushing waters of the Maurienne, and the fact that setting up on French soil meant avoiding heavy export duty to France, it was here that they took delivery of raw grain. Milled, whitened and polished with sheepskin, the cereal was powdered with talc and glucose and paraffin-waxed before being dispatched by rail throughout France. Listed as a historical monument in February 1987, the Rizerie des Alpes now houses an exhibition on tunnelling through the Alps.
