Pietro's parents marry in the Dolomites and move to Milan

Pietro’s parents’ marriage in the Dolomites and their departure for Milan joined a private mountain romance to a decisive break with their families’ past. The wedding, held in October 1972, became the family’s foundational story; the next day the couple left the mountains for a new life in the city.

Background: A bond formed after loss

The Dolomites were the first mountains and first love of Pietro’s parents, who had grown up in the Veneto countryside. Years later, Pietro’s mother recounted how she had first known his father as her brother’s friend, and how friendship grew through singing, drinking, walking, and harvesting grapes together. After an accident for which Pietro’s father was blamed, she felt that it was unjust for him to be left alone with the blame. They began meeting to talk, fell in love, and married about a year later.

The wedding in the Dolomites

A priest who had taken them to the mountains as adolescents also married them at a small chapel below Tre Cime di Lavaredo. They had only a handful of friends present, and wore anoraks rather than wedding clothes. Pietro’s maternal grandparents boycotted the wedding for reasons he did not know. The couple spent their first night as husband and wife at the Auronzo refuge, with snow already shining on the ledges of Cima Grande. In the family’s memory, the mountain setting made the wedding more than a ceremony: it anchored the family’s beginning in the place where the couple had fallen in love.

Departure for Milan

The wedding marked the end of the couple’s climbing season and, as Pietro’s account puts it, the end of their years in the mountains. The following day they packed their leather climbing boots and plus fours into the car. His mother was pregnant, and his father had a contract for a new job; together, these details made the departure both a family beginning and a practical move toward a different life. They headed for Milan, where they would make a new home and find new work, friends, and mountains.

A family story retold

The marriage reaches the reader through more than one act of recollection. Pietro first understands it as the family’s origin story, then hears his mother explain how it followed his father’s estrangement from her family after the accident. Her account recasts the move to Milan as a shared beginning after grief and blame, rather than simply an escape from the countryside.

Much later, when Pietro brings his mother to the house he and Bruno have built, she studies the lake, scree, peaks, and house as if to remember them. She looks at the rock inscription commemorating Giovanni Guasti and joins Pietro and Bruno in a song for a dead lover of the mountains. That scene does not repeat the wedding, but echoes its union of family, mountain place, and remembrance: the marriage that began the family in the Dolomites becomes part of the memory through which Pietro understands his father and the home he builds.