Hiking in Mount Rosa: trails, map and practical info

The Monte Rosa (or synonymously used as a pleonasm: Monte Rosa massif (Italian: massiccio del Monte Rosa; German: Monte Rosa-Massiv; French: massif du Mont Rose) is a mountain massif located in the eastern part of the Pennine Alps. It is located between Switzerland (Valais) and Italy (Piedmont and Aosta Valley). Monte Rosa is the second highest mountain in the Alps and western Europe. Monte Rosa is a huge ice-covered mountain in the Alps, located on the watershed between northern and southern Europe. Its main summit, named Dufourspitze in honor of the surveyor Guillaume-Henri Dufour, culminates at 4,634 m (15,203 ft) above sea level and is followed by the five nearly equally high subsidiary summits of Dunantspitze, Grenzgipfel, Nordend, Zumsteinspitze and Signalkuppe. Monte Rosa is the highest mountain of both Switzerland and the Pennine Alps and is also the second-highest mountain of the Alps and Europe outside the Caucasus. Monte Rosa covers the region on both side of the border between Switzerland and Italy, although its two main summits, unlike the four lower ones, lies on the Swiss side, within the canton of Valais. On the north-west side of the central Monte Rosa massif, with its enormous ice slopes and seracs, forms the boundary and upper basin of the large Gorner Glacier, which descends towards Zermatt and confluences with its nowadays much larger tributary, the Grenzgletscher (English: Border Glacier), right below the Monte Rosa Hut on the lower end of the visible western wing. The Grenzgletscher forms the impressive glacier between its western wing and Liskamm, a ridge on its southwestern side on the Swiss-Italian border. On the east side, in Italy, the mountain forms an almost vertical 2,400 metres (7,900 ft)-high wall of granite and ice, the biggest in Europe, overlooking Macugnaga and several smaller glaciers. Monte Rosa was studied by pioneering geologists and explorers, including Leonardo da Vinci in the late fifteenth century and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in the late eighteenth century. Following a long series of attempts beginning in the early nineteenth century, Monte Rosa's summit, then still called Höchste Spitze (English: Highest Peak), was first reached in 1855 from Zermatt by a party of eight climbers led by three guides. The great east wall was first climbed in 1872, from Macugnaga. Each summer a large number of climbers set out from the Monte Rosa Hut on the mountain's west wing for one of its summits via the normal route or for the Margherita Hut on the Signalkuppe (Italian: Punta Gnifetti), used as a research station. Many tourists and hikers also come each year to the Gornergrat on the north-west side of the massif, to see the panorama that extends over the giants of the Alps, from Monte Rosa to the Matterhorn.