Italy is both a country the narrator leaves and the place whose landscapes continue to draw him back. Its cities hold work, migration, and economic disillusionment; its mountain valleys preserve a more intimate history, visible in old paths, ruined buildings, and the changing lives of the people who remain. The contrast makes movement through Italy more than a matter of distance: a return can expose what has changed while reaffirming what remains personally irreplaceable.

Cities, departure, and distance

At twenty-three, after military service, Pietro left Milan for Turin to join a girlfriend, following an idea inherited from his parents: that at a decisive point in youth, a person should leave the place where they were born and raised to develop elsewhere. The relationship ended, but Turin became home. Its ancient rivers and arcade cafés made him feel at ease, and he wandered the city with little money, reading Hemingway and staying open to work and new encounters. He hoped to earn a living as a documentary filmmaker, but took whatever jobs would pay the rent. The mountains remained in the background of this urban life, visible on the horizon whenever he left his apartment.

The move also extended the distance between Pietro and his father. A hundred and twenty kilometres of rice fields separated Turin from his father’s home: not a great distance, but one that required a desire to cross it. After Pietro abandoned university, disappointing his father, the two argued over whose life had been wasted and stopped speaking for a year. Pietro understood separation as a condition of making a life different from his father’s; once established, the distance suited neither man enough to close it.

Work, travel, and the mountain economy

Italy’s mountain valleys are connected to the cities by routes that also carry people and goods. In late July, Pietro accompanied Lara down from the farmstead with the first cheese Bruno had produced there: twelve loaves, weighing sixty kilos in all, matured for six weeks and packed onto a wooden saddle on a small, dark-coated female mule. The delivery was a milestone for the farm. Bruno kissed Lara, patted the mule, and stayed behind to clean the stable. As on the building site, he treated transport as work for someone else: he would remain in the mountains, while Lara carried the produce down to the valley. She and Pietro continued in single file along the steep path, helping the mule manage the forward-heavy load; once the track crossed the river and flattened, they could walk side by side.

This division of movement recurs in Pietro’s own life. Years later, returning from Nepal, he found Italy in 2010 amid a severe economic crisis. Milan seemed to announce it at once: the airport looked nearly decommissioned, with only four planes on kilometres of runway, while luxury-shop windows gleamed over empty stores. From the train, however, Pietro saw cranes and high-rise building sites everywhere, an apparent boom that contradicted reports that money had run out. The companies where he had worked—in production, advertising, and television—were closing through bankruptcy. Friends nearing forty had only occasional work and were relying on retired parents. Their anger at the buildings rising around them sharpened Pietro’s sense of disillusionment; he was relieved to have a ticket that would let him leave.

Return to the valley

A few days later, Pietro travelled by coach into the mountains and continued by another coach to the beginning of the valley. He got off at the bar where he had once called his mother, though the red telephone box was gone. The old mule track had become choked with brambles and leaves, so he climbed through the woods by memory. Near the ruins of the tower, a mobile-phone mast now stood; in the gully, a cement dam interrupted the river, and an excavator dredged mud from the reservoir, its tracks damaging the meadows where Bruno had grazed cattle as a boy.

Beyond Grana, the valley seemed to leave behind the damage of the present. Neglect, rather than deliberate preservation, had kept much of the childhood landscape unchanged. Pietro found the clearing he and Bruno had called the sawmill, with its old tracks and timber-cutting trolley, and nearby the cable lift once used to send planks up to the alpine pastures. Its steel cable had become engulfed in the bark of a larch. The place had been forgotten because it had little economic value; for Pietro, that neglect had protected a landscape he did not want the journey to end.

Winter, crisis, and disappearance

The Italian mountains also register economic and environmental pressures. In December, Pietro visited Lara at a small ski resort whose few businesses struggled with both the economic crisis and climate change. Its Alpine-style restaurant and artificial snow seemed at odds with the tired waitress who had once lived on the mountain farm. Lara showed him a photograph of her daughter Anita, now in her first year of school, and described a child who was difficult to contain within school rules but felt at home among farm animals. The visit brought into view another life shaped by the valley: Lara had left the farmstead for precarious work, while her daughter’s ease with animals suggested an attachment that might outlast that change.

In the winter of 2014, the Western Alps received their heaviest snowfall in half a century: three metres at the highest resorts by the end of December, six by the end of January, and eight by the end of February. From Nepal, Pietro could scarcely imagine that depth; it was enough to bury woods and houses. In March, Lara told him that Bruno was missing from Barma. His cousins and a helicopter-borne rescue team found the house buried and dug through its roof, but Bruno was not inside. No tracks could be found, and the pair of skis Pietro suggested checking for was missing too. Rescue teams searched with dogs for a week, but deep snow and avalanche danger limited the effort. After a winter in which avalanches had killed twenty-two people on Italian mountainsides, Bruno’s disappearance in the valley attracted little wider attention. Pietro and Lara expected that the thaw would eventually reveal him, perhaps in a gorge; the account leaves his fate unresolved, with the mountains and snow obscuring the final answer.