The Parents Marry in the Dolomites and Move to Milan

The marriage of Pietro’s parents in the Dolomites, followed immediately by their move to Milan, marks the point where their mountain life became family history rather than daily life. Recalled both as the origin story of the family and as the beginning of a new life in the city, the wedding joined a private act of commitment to a decisive departure from the places where the couple had first fallen in love.

Courtship After the Family Rift

The couple’s relationship grew out of a long acquaintance. Pietro’s mother had known his father since they were young, at first regarding him as the friend of her brother. They later became friends in their own right, sharing songs, drinks, walks, and grape harvests. After an accident left Pietro’s father in a terrible state and under the blame of the family, she felt he had been treated unfairly and left to bear the consequences alone. Their meetings to talk brought them closer, and they fell in love.

The family rupture shaped the circumstances of the wedding. In his mother’s later account, roughly a year after the accident the couple married, while the wider family refused their invitations. The prologue remembers the exclusion more specifically through the absence of Pietro’s maternal grandparents, who boycotted the ceremony for reasons the narrator did not know. The accounts agree on the wedding’s isolation: the couple had no relatives present and were prepared to leave for Milan to begin again.

A Mountain Wedding

The wedding took place on an autumn morning in front of the small chapel at the foot of Tre Cime di Lavaredo. A priest who had taken the couple into the mountains when they were adolescents officiated. They celebrated with only a handful of friends, wearing anoraks rather than wedding clothes; their first night as husband and wife was spent in the Auronzo refuge. Snow already gleamed on the ledges of Cima Grande, placing the ceremony amid the Dolomite landscape in which their relationship had begun.

For the family, this mountain marriage became a foundational story. Its modest details—the outdoor setting, the small gathering, the refuge bed—stand in contrast to a conventional wedding celebration, while the setting connects the couple’s shared past to the family life that followed. The wedding was not merely a return to a beloved landscape: it was also the last day before the couple left it as their home.

Departure for Milan

On the Saturday after the ceremony, in October 1972, the couple packed their leather climbing boots and plus fours into the car and headed for Milan. They carried with them two immediate responsibilities: Pietro’s mother was pregnant, and his father had a contract for a new job. The departure therefore joined a change of place to the start of parenthood and a new working life.

The move continued a larger migration away from the couple’s rural origins. Pietro’s mother had been born in the Veneto countryside, and his father had been raised there as an orphan of the war; both had been drawn to the Dolomites as their first mountains and first love. In Milan, as his mother later described it, they would make a new house, find new jobs and friends, and seek new mountains. The move began their shared urban life without erasing the landscape that had brought them together.

Family Memory and Legacy

Pietro learned to understand the wedding as more than a date in his parents’ history. In childhood he could hear the Dolomite place-names in their conversations before he understood their significance; later, he recognized that the mountains were where his parents had fallen in love and where the family’s story began. His mother’s account supplied the difficult circumstances behind that beginning: his father’s isolation after the accident, her sense of injustice, and the family’s refusal to attend.

The marriage’s legacy reappears in Pietro’s later effort to remember his father through a house built with Bruno. There, Pietro carved his father’s name and dates into the rock and added the memorial line, In memory is the most beautiful refuge. At the house’s completion, he told Bruno that it should belong to both of them, believing that this was what his father had wanted and wanting the home to reflect the work they had shared. The later memorial does not repeat the parents’ departure for Milan; it answers it by making a shared mountain dwelling a place of remembrance and continuity.