“There’s nothing like the mountains for making you remember”

“There’s nothing like the mountains for making you remember” names a process at the heart of Pietro’s return to the mountains: familiar paths and summits make the past present, including memories and relationships that were not fully understood at the time. Spoken by an elderly climber and then recognized by Pietro in his own experience, the expression links private recollection to the mountains’ physical traces of a life shared across generations.

The Saying and Its Speaker

Pietro hears the remark while talking with an old, white-whiskered climber whom he meets on a less-frequented mountain route. The man explains that returning to the same track each year feels like immersing himself in recollections and climbing back through the course of his own memory. He comes from the rice-growing countryside between Novara and Vercelli, where, as a child, he was told that the water used for drinking, rivers, and flooded rice fields came from Monte Rosa. The glacier visible above the fields connected the landscape of his childhood to the water on which life below depended.

The exchange is intimate rather than ceremonial. The man is a widower who misses his wife; as they talk, he fills his pipe, takes a canteen from his rucksack, pours grappa onto a sugar cube, and offers it to Pietro. After telling him that the drink will help him climb, he adds, “Well anyway, there’s nothing like the mountains for making you remember.” The words emerge from an ordinary meeting between climbers, but the man’s yearly returns and his grief give the phrase a particular weight: the route carries not only him up a mountain, but back through a life.

Pietro’s Recognition

Pietro does not treat the saying as a general maxim detached from his own story. He acknowledges that he, too, is beginning to understand it. In the weeks after finding his father’s altered mountain map, he follows its routes and searches for Giovanni Guasti on overlooked peaks lower in the valley. There he encounters solitary older climbers whose repeated visits seem to bring him close to his father. The mountains become a place where memory is activated by walking, not simply recalled at a distance.

The map gives this process a concrete form. Once a record of the valley’s trails, it has become a dense, multicolored account of twenty years of excursions, marking summits, alpine pastures, and refuges. Pietro works out its color code: black records his father’s routes, red accompanies Pietro on their climbs, and green marks Bruno. He discovers that many routes combine black and green, a finding that stirs jealousy even as it reassures him that his father did not spend all those years alone. The map makes remembered relationships legible through the paths they traveled together, while also exposing how much of his father’s life Pietro had not seen.

Records That Bring the Past Forward

The phrase’s meaning also unfolds through the summit notebooks Pietro finds while retracing his father’s routes. At a barren peak above his house, he discovers a metal box holding a weather-damaged notebook. Its sparse entries include one from 1997, written by Giovanni after he climbed from Grana in three hours and fifty-eight minutes and proudly recorded that he was still in good shape. Pietro imagines his father alone on the scree, hurrying to finish in under four hours, and reading the entry makes a past ascent feel present without turning it into a shared memory: Pietro knows the handwriting and can picture the climb, but he can only infer the circumstances.

Other notebooks extend that encounter. Giovanni’s brief entries recall returning to a peak, walking through thick fog while singing old songs, seeing ibexes, eagles, and fresh snow, or wishing to remain in the mountains without going back down to the valley. These records let Pietro meet successive versions of his father in the landscapes where he walked. Their brevity leaves gaps, but the repeated handwriting and named details provide something tangible to follow. The mountains prompt recollection; the map and notebooks preserve its traces.

From Recollection to Remembrance

Pietro’s understanding of his father changes as these traces accumulate. After hearing his mother’s account of the family’s past, he thinks about his father’s way of looking at glaciers: summer melts snow and seems to erase memory, while a glacier holds the snow of earlier winters. Pietro recognizes that he had known two versions of Giovanni—the city father from whom he had become estranged and the mountain walker he had only glimpsed, yet felt he knew better. The expression about mountains and memory resonates with this belated recognition: returning to the landscape helps Pietro apprehend a father whose inner life was not available to him in the city.

That recognition takes material and communal form when Pietro’s mother visits the house he and Bruno have built. Pietro has carved Giovanni’s name and dates into the rock wall and painted the inscription black: “IN MEMORY IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL REFUGE”. His mother studies the lake, scree, peaks, and house so that she will remember them, then calls Pietro and Bruno to sing the song associated with a mountain lover’s death. Pietro makes the house theirs, not his alone, because he believes his father left it between them and because the two friends built it together. Memory here is not only an inward return: it is carried by routes, written records, a house, an inscription, and a shared act of remembrance.