Piedmont serves as both a landscape of private memory and a proving ground for the Plan: a weekend journey through its hills, castles, and woods carries Casaubon from curiosity toward conviction, while exposing the gap between lived experience and the conspiratorial meanings he imposes on it. The region is not merely a backdrop. Belbo’s childhood recollections, the travelers’ encounter with a Rosicrucian gathering and a nocturnal rite, and Casaubon’s later reinterpretation of a Portuguese castle all make place itself part of the novel’s machinery of memory and pattern-making.

The Journey and Its Double Appointment

Belbo proposes a trip from Milan after telling Casaubon that the evening has two appointments in store. First comes a party at the castle of a wealthy Rosicrucian; later, Aglie will lead them several kilometers away to a midnight rite, whose druidic character Belbo cannot confidently identify. Belbo also wants to resume work on their history of metals at his old house in Piedmont, where Diotallevi and perhaps Lorenza are expected. Casaubon accepts while estranged from Lia and wanting a few days away from Milan; he says he will travel alone, though the Garamond trio and Lorenza eventually set out together.

Lorenza briefly suggests staying behind so the men can work undisturbed and joining them later with Simon. Belbo, gripping the steering wheel with locked elbows and staring straight ahead, tells her to get in. She does, and keeps a hand on the back of his neck throughout the silent drive. Their arrival therefore carries an intimacy and tension that the expedition’s occult program cannot contain. Before the party or the rite begins, the journey has already brought the group’s personal attachments into the same confined space as its shared investigations.

As Belbo drives, he points out the changed countryside around his old town: agriculture is declining, young people have left for the cities, and hills once yellow with grain are now pasture. The town appears beyond a bend beneath the low hill where his house stands, with the Monferrato plain visible through luminous mist. Across from the house, he indicates a nearly bare hill called the Bricco, crowned by a chapel between two pines. He recalls walking there on Easter Monday for the Angel’s lunch, when the trip was a pilgrimage rather than a five-minute drive. Modern access and remembered foot travel coexist in the same view: the landscape is changing, but Belbo’s account restores the distances and ritual associations of childhood.

Belbo’s Landscape of Memory

At the old house, Diotallevi remarks on its sweet memories. Belbo agrees that these are the only real things he remembers. Casaubon later understands that the wartime town offers Belbo a contrast to the ambiguities surrounding the Diabolicals and Colonel Ardenti’s disappearance. In Belbo’s recollection, a bullet was simply a bullet, and the opposing sides were distinct, marked red or black. A corpse was unmistakably a corpse. The memory’s clarity is not presented as an uncomplicated historical truth: Casaubon recognizes that it is the clarity Belbo remembers, and that doubt may have begun even then.

Belbo’s nostalgia is sharpened by the limits of his own part in history. Even in those years of apparent moral divisions, he had watched other people make the memories and history he would not write. Yet he adds that he performed the one heroic deed of his life. The childhood landscape thus holds both a wished-for certainty and the possibility of a decisive act; it does not simply certify that Belbo was a hero or that the past was free of ambiguity. His recollections become especially poignant against the Plan’s accumulating falsehoods: Piedmont preserves for him a time when the world seemed legible, even as Casaubon increasingly turns legibility into a conspiracy.

The countryside also records social and economic change. Belbo describes a town with few new houses and an agricultural decline caused by the young people’s migration to the city. The hills that had once carried grain now serve as pasture. His personal return therefore passes through a landscape whose visible transformation supports the distinction between remembered home and present-day place. The old house and the Bricco remain anchors, but their setting is no longer the one Belbo knew during the war.

Castle, Wood, and Occult Performance

After meeting Aglie and Garamond at a café in a village square, the party continues in two cars, Garamond’s Mercedes ahead of Belbo’s Renault. Lorenza is absent from the later proceedings, and Aglie remarks that her reserve about joining the mysteries is singular and welcome. As daylight fades, the group reaches a strange yellow building on a hill, like an eighteenth-century castle, with terraces of flowers and trees flourishing despite the season. Cars fill an open space at its foot; Aglie tells them to leave the cars and continue on foot.

The castle visit is followed, near midnight, by another journey through the hills. After driving for three-quarters of an hour, the group parks at the edge of a wood and crosses underbrush toward a clearing, with neither roads nor trails. Aglie uses a flashlight only briefly, warning that the celebrants should not be alerted to their presence. The approach makes the rite feel secretive before its nature is known: the participants move through shrubs, vines, rotting leaves, and slippery roots, while Aglie’s concern for silence curbs Diotallevi’s joking. Piedmont’s terrain becomes a passage from the social setting of the castle party into an event staged as hidden knowledge.

Casaubon returns from the excursion feeling guilty, but seeing Lia again quickly displaces the desires that had drawn him into the surrounding intrigues. The journey nevertheless leaves an intellectual mark. While arranging illustrations for the history of metals, he can no longer keep resemblance at bay: a cylindrical stove designed by Réaumur, an egg-incubation chamber, and a seventeenth-century athanor begin to merge in his mind as forms of a maternal womb. The effect is as if the Deutsches Museum had been installed in the Piedmont castle. Objects associated with technical history now seem to repeat occult images, and the visit helps unsettle the boundary Casaubon had trusted between magic and factual knowledge.

From Place to Plan

Casaubon’s later reflections show how an actual place can become a component in an invented historical system. On a visit to Tomar in Portugal, he interprets the castle of the Knights of Christ as the first meeting place in the message of Provins. He reasons that Templars who were more accustomed to directing commanderies than reading romances would have chosen a real, protected castle, not a legendary Avalon or Monsalvat. The association is not evidence supplied by the Piedmont excursion; rather, it reveals the interpretive method the excursion has helped strengthen. Casaubon takes places and images encountered in his travels and makes them answer a developing narrative.

That method later folds the Piedmont castle into an imagined sequence. Casaubon connects the festivities at Heidelberg and Salomon de Caus’s hanging gardens to the castle gathering in Piedmont, then links both to the symbols of the Golden Fleece and the Garter that he believes are also present at Tomar. In his account, the Rosicrucian manifestos become an appeal by English Templars, aided by German allies, to reunite the interrupted Plan. A specific landscape, an occult gathering, architectural features, and historical emblems are made to confirm one another. The chain feels persuasive because each element has a concrete place or object attached to it, even though the narrative connection is constructed by the investigators.

Piedmont’s significance therefore rests in a double function. It holds Belbo’s remembered world of war, childhood ritual, and apparent moral clarity, and it supplies Casaubon with settings through which to intensify his search for correspondences. The same hills can be home, memory, and supposed evidence; the same castle can host a gathering and later be absorbed into a story about hidden historical continuity. The region marks the point at which physical experience and the Plan’s imaginative geography begin to overlap, while Belbo’s memories offer a troubling counterweight: a life may feel most certain in retrospect precisely where later interpretation threatens to make everything part of a design.