Barma is a mountain ruin on a rock face above a lake, transformed by Pietro and Bruno into a house and an open refuge. The work gives the two friends a home built by their own labor; its inscription to Giovanni Guasti also makes the rebuilt place a material form of Pietro’s remembrance of his father.

Setting and Earlier Meanings

Barma belongs to a landscape of steep paths, lakeshore, scree, and the peaks of Grenon. For Pietro, returning to the mountain is not a simple recovery of an earlier affection: he cannot clearly remember why he had distanced himself from it, or what else he had found to love instead. Walking back up alone each morning, he gradually begins to make peace with the place. The approach to Barma thus marks a change in his relation to the mountain as well as the site of a construction project.

The ruin is part of a landscape where buildings bear the traces of lives that have ended or moved on. Pietro had previously connected Bruno’s explanations of abandoned structures and the remains of the village to a hidden history of mountain life. That attention to what survives in damaged places becomes especially consequential at Barma: here, the ruin is not only something to interpret but something the friends can repair and inhabit.

Building the House

The rebuilding proceeds through practical, physically demanding work. Pietro and Bruno construct each wall as two parallel rows of stone, filling the space between them with smaller stones and tying the rows together at intervals with larger stones laid across the gap. They use as little cement as possible. Pietro has to carry it uphill in sacks weighing twenty-five kilos, while sand for the mortar comes from a small beach on the far shore of the lake. He makes repeated trips to fill the mule’s saddlebags, and takes particular satisfaction in knowing that this lake sand is helping hold the house together.

By July, Barma has the bustle of a sawmill. Planks of pine, two metres long and still white with resin, crowd the terrace. Eight roof beams rest between the rock face and the long wall, fixed to iron brackets, set at an angle of thirty degrees, and supported midway by a long larch beam. The design works with the site rather than hiding it: the door faces west, while two arched windows face north toward the lake. Bruno spends days shaping their surrounding stones with a mallet and chisel. The old building’s two levels, once a stable below and living room above, are to become a single, taller interior.

The Finished Refuge

Completed in September, the house combines one wooden room with one stone room. The larger wooden room is warmer, with a stove, table, two stools, and a larder. Some furnishings are salvaged from other ruins and cleaned by Pietro; Bruno makes others from old floorboards. A ladder leads to a loft tucked beneath the roof against the rock face, the house’s warmest and most enclosed corner. The smaller, cooler stone room serves as cellar, workshop, and storeroom.

The building remains deliberately spare: it has no bathroom, running water, or electricity. Its windows have thick panes, and its sturdy front door has a latch but no lock. The stone room is locked to protect tools and equipment; the wooden room is left open, in keeping with the custom of mountain refuges, so that a passerby in difficulty can find shelter. Around it, the grass is cut like a garden, firewood is stacked under a lean-to, and a small pine tree looks toward the lake. Barma is at once the friends’ home and a place meant to remain available to others.

A Shared Home and Memorial

On the last day of the work, Pietro brings his mother up to see the house. She climbs for two hours at her own steady pace and is delighted by what Pietro and Bruno have built. Inside, Bruno has lit the stove; they drink tea by the window. His mother looks out at the view, then steps onto the terrace and studies the lake, scree, peaks of Grenon, and the house as if fixing them in memory. She pauses at the inscription Pietro has cut into the rock wall and painted black: Giovanni Guasti’s name and dates, 1942–2004, above the words, In memory is the most beautiful refuge.

His mother calls for a song sung when a lover of the mountains dies, asking God to let him continue walking in the afterlife. Pietro and Bruno both know it. With his mother there to witness and remember what is said, Pietro declares that the house should not belong to him alone but to both friends. He believes his father intended the house to be shared, but also insists that this is what he wants because he and Bruno built it together. Barma’s memorial meaning is therefore bound to an act of present-day friendship: the place commemorates Giovanni while becoming a home held in common by his son and Bruno.

Return in the Snow

Barma’s purpose as shelter becomes tangible again during a later Christmas visit. Snow has risen in walls almost as high as the house. Bruno has cleared the roof and dug a trench around the building, widening it into a small square in front of the door. Inside, the house feels like a burrow: the window is blind behind layers of snow, and Pietro has barely sat down before something lands on the tiled roof with a tremendous thud. Bruno laughs and teases him about whether the rotten roof tiles were properly repaired; the impacts continue while the house holds.

The interior has also changed. Bruno has hammered nails into the walls to support new shelves and filled them with books, clothes, and tools. The modest refuge has acquired the unmistakable signs of everyday occupation. Where the finished house was designed to offer an unlocked room to a stranger in need, Bruno’s additions show Barma also becoming his lived-in home. Its changing character—from ruin, to jointly built refuge, to snowbound dwelling—makes the mountain place a continuing bond between the two friends rather than a completed project left behind.