Bruno and Lara’s mountain farm is the realization of Bruno’s decision to become, in his own words, a man of the mountains. It turns an abandoned family farmstead into a working dairy and a shared home, then exposes the distance between a life sustained by care and skill and a business that must meet its debts. Pietro witnesses both the farm’s brief revival and its eventual collapse.

Origins and Decision

While Bruno and Pietro were working on the house at Barma, Bruno explained that he wanted to buy his uncle’s farmstead. He had been saving, and his cousins, eager to be rid of the place and their unhappy memories of it, had named a price. Bruno had spent his savings on a down payment and hoped to borrow the balance from a bank. Their months at Barma had served as a trial: he now believed he could manage a life at altitude and planned to spend the following summer rebuilding the farm’s huts and buying cattle, with the aim of having the farm operating within a few years.

The project was not simply a financial choice. Bruno acknowledged that keeping cows would not pay particularly well, but said that if money were his only concern he would stay in building work. He liked being a builder, yet regarded it as temporary, something he could do rather than the work he felt born to do. He described his vocation as being a man of the mountains, an identity connected to the people who had lived there before him and to the woods, meadows, and derelict houses he had explored throughout his life.

That inheritance was also a landscape of neglect. Bruno said his uncle had stopped repairing the farmstead: a broken chair went into the stove, and invasive plants were left to spread in the meadow. His father cursed when the place was mentioned and took satisfaction in its decline. Bruno’s plan therefore answered not only a personal longing but a family history of abandonment. Rebuilding meant returning labor and use to a place that the previous generation had allowed to run down.

Bringing the Farm Back to Life

After a winter with little snow, Bruno chose the first Saturday in June to take the cattle up to the alpeggio. Pietro helped when twenty-eight pregnant dairy cows arrived in a truck in the piazza in Grana. The animals were unsettled and threatened to scatter, so Bruno, his mother, Lara, and Pietro positioned themselves around the square to contain and calm them. Two black dogs from a local shepherding line then helped guide the herd along the mule track, running after stragglers and bringing them back into line.

The climb turned the farm’s plans into a public, physical reality. Bruno led the animals with repeated calls, while Lara and his mother followed and Pietro brought up the rear. The dogs’ barking, the cows’ calls, and their bells filled the valley as the herd passed derelict huts, weed-ridden stone walls, and the gray stumps of felled larches. To Pietro, the movement resembled a circulation returning to a body: the neglected landscape was not merely scenery but a place beginning to function again through animal movement and human work.

The farm buildings—a house, a stable, and a storeroom—had been reconstructed in stone, their roofs and walls restored to an earlier form even as they became the premises of a modern agricultural enterprise. Bruno went down to the cellar and brought back white wine, recalling the gesture his uncle had once made there. Now Bruno was master of the place. With no chairs yet available, the group toasted standing at the stable threshold while the cows grew accustomed to the mountain.

Work, Care, and Production

Bruno organized the farm around daily animal care and hands-on cheese making. He insisted on milking by hand because he considered it suited to the delicate cows, which could be startled easily. Each cow took about five minutes to milk; at that pace, he handled roughly twelve an hour and spent two and a half hours on the whole herd. The work began before daylight, left no Saturdays or Sundays free, and displaced the ease of sleeping late or lingering in bed with Lara. Even so, Bruno valued the routine and would not delegate it. The hours in the warm stable helped him wake as he worked, treating the milking as an individual act of care for each animal.

Lara brought him coffee and biscuits at seven and took the herd out to pasture twice a day. Bruno combined about one hundred and fifty liters of fresh milk with the same amount from the previous evening, after skimming off the cream. He heated the milk, added rennet, and by nine strained and pressed the mixture into wooden molds. The yield was five or six cheeses, around thirty kilos of toma from three hundred liters of milk. He made butter from the cream, then cleaned the boiler, churns, pails, work surfaces, and stable. After a short midday rest, he turned to other farm tasks, such as building an enclosure for calves or digging drainage where rain had waterlogged the pasture. The cows returned for a second milking at four; Lara took them out again at seven, after which the pace of work eased into evening.

Production also depended on processes Bruno could not fully control. He followed the method he had been taught and cared for the cows carefully, but could not be certain whether each batch would form properly or taste good. Cheese making joined learned technique and attention to the animals with an outcome that remained uncertain. That uncertainty was part of the work, not an interruption to it.

First Sales and the Limits of the Enterprise

The first delivery made the farm’s production legible as a business. Toward the end of July, after six weeks of maturation, Lara and Pietro took the first cheese down to the village. Bruno had acquired a smaller, dark-coated female mule for the task and made a wooden packsaddle. Twelve loaves, weighing sixty kilos altogether, were loaded for the trip. Bruno kissed Lara, patted the mule, and sent them on their way, then returned to clean the stable. He had decided, as he had in building work, that transport was not his role: he would remain in the mountains, while Lara went up and down with the goods.

In Grana, a buyer inspected each cheese by feeling its crust, smelling it, and tapping it to check for air bubbles. He weighed the loaves, recorded the weights, and gave Lara a receipt showing the couple’s first earnings. The sale was a milestone, but it also marked the beginning of a commercial chain in which the farm’s demanding production had to find buyers and generate income. Pietro left for Turin for a time; Lara returned up the path with the mule and a dog, carrying on the movement between the farm and the valley.

The financial strain became clear when Pietro visited again after an absence of two years. He found the farmstead’s upkeep deteriorating and learned that the cheese income did not cover the mortgage repayments. Summer self-sufficiency could not offset winter expenses, including rent for the stables. Bruno and Lara had taken another loan to meet existing debts. Lara tried to improve the terms of sale by bypassing the distributor and delivering directly to shopkeepers twice a week. The change meant more work and left Bruno managing the farm alone while she drove deliveries; hiring help would have added costs they could not afford. Their conversations increasingly turned to money, and Bruno resented that financial worries occupied the time he and Pietro spent together.

Collapse and Significance

The business pressures strained the partnership as well as the farm. Pietro’s mother kept in touch with both men and cared for Anita, Bruno and Lara’s daughter, at Grana during the summers, partly to relieve her parents of childcare while they worked. She saw Lara’s exasperation over the debts and Bruno’s retreat into silence and work. In autumn 2013, Bruno declared bankruptcy, shut down the agricultural business, and handed the farm keys to the bailiff; Lara went to live with her parents with Anita. Pietro’s mother understood the separation differently, believing Lara had chosen to leave and Bruno had surrendered to failure. The accounts differed, but the result did not: the farm and the couple’s life together had ended, and Bruno was left alone.

The farm’s arc moves from restoration to exposure. Bringing the cows up the valley makes abandoned buildings seem capable of life again, while the routines of milking, feeding, cleaning, making cheese, and carrying it to market show what that renewal costs in time and labor. The same mountains that give Bruno a sense of purpose cannot shield the enterprise from loans, winter expenses, or the limits of what cheese sales earn. His effort is neither simply a pastoral escape nor an uncomplicated success: it gives form to a chosen identity and revives a neglected place, but its economic failure turns that commitment into a source of conflict and loss.