Barma house

Barma house is a refuge rebuilt by Pietro and Bruno from a mountain ruin, but its importance exceeds the shelter it provides. As the two men shape its roof and rooms, the house becomes a shared undertaking, a memorial to Giovanni Guasti, and a place whose meaning changes with the seasons: open to strangers in need, then made intensely domestic by Bruno’s books and belongings.

From ruin to building site

In July, the work at Barma has the bustle of a sawmill. Pietro has brought up loads of pine planks, and the terrace is crowded with two-meter boards, white and fragrant with resin. Eight roof beams stretch between the rock face and the long wall, held by iron brackets, slanting at thirty degrees, and supported at the middle by a larch beam. The frame makes the future house imaginable before it is finished: its door will face west, while two north-facing windows will look toward the lake.

Bruno gives those windows an individual character. He wants them arched and spends whole days shaping their surrounding stones with mallet and chisel. The plan abandons the old division between a stable below and a living room above. Instead, the pair intend to make one taller, more spacious floor, with two rooms corresponding to the windows. Pietro can picture the building more readily than its eventual light, which remains beyond his ability to visualize. The house thus takes form first as structure and shared labor, while its lived atmosphere is still a possibility.

Rooms, materials, and use

Completed in September, the house combines one wooden room and one stone room. The larger wooden room is warmer, with a stove, table, two stools, and larder. Some furnishings have been rescued from other ruins and cleaned by Pietro with elbow grease and sandpaper; Bruno has made others from planks taken from the old floor. A ladder leads to a loft beneath the roof, set against the rock face and described as the warmest, most enclosed corner. The table stands directly under a window, making the view part of the room’s ordinary use.

The smaller stone room is cool and serves as cellar, workshop, and storeroom. It holds most of the equipment used in the rebuilding and all the leftover wood. The house has no bathroom, running water, or electricity, but its windows have thick panes. Its sturdy front door closes with a latch, not a lock. Only the stone room is secured, because the tools and supplies kept there might be stolen; the wooden room is deliberately left open, in keeping with mountain refuges, so a passerby in difficulty can find shelter. Outside, the grass has been cut like a garden, firewood is stacked beneath a lean-to, and a small pine replanted by Pietro remains beside the house, not noticeably stronger than when it was moved.

A shared home and a memorial

The house’s completion brings the family into its space. Pietro brings his mother up from Grana, expecting the climb to tire her, but she ascends for two hours at her own steady pace without stopping. Inside, Bruno has lit the stove, and the group drinks tea by the window. Pietro’s mother likes the view; before leaving, she goes onto the terrace to take in the lake, scree, peaks of Grenon, and the appearance of the house, looking carefully as if to remember them.

The terrace also holds a memorial to Giovanni Guasti. Pietro has chiseled his father’s name and dates, 1942–2004, into the rock wall and painted the inscription black. His mother pauses to read it. She then calls Pietro and Bruno to sing the mountain song for a dead lover of the mountains, asking that he be allowed to keep walking in the afterlife. The inscription and song make the house a site of remembrance, but Pietro’s decision about ownership gives that remembrance a living consequence: he says the house should be theirs, his and Bruno’s, because they built it together. He believes Giovanni wanted it left between them, but also insists that shared ownership is his own choice. Bruno asks whether Pietro is sure; Pietro confirms that he is.

Inheritance, memory, and the mountain

The house’s role as a memorial is bound to Pietro’s changing understanding of his father. In the old kitchen, Pietro notices that Giovanni’s map remains thumbtacked to the wall. Over twenty years, its marks have transformed a map of valley trails into a dense record of routes across summits, alpine pastures, and refuges. Pietro reads the colors through remembered climbs: black marks Giovanni, red accompanies Pietro on their high peaks, and green identifies Bruno. The map reveals that Giovanni continued going into the mountains with Bruno as well as alone, and Pietro wonders whether its accumulated lines contain a message for him.

Pietro’s mother’s account and his own reflections lead him to distinguish the father he knew in the city from the man he had glimpsed in the mountains: the walker who followed him on paths and loved glaciers. He understands the ruin at Barma as something this second father has left him to rebuild, and resolves to finish the work in his memory. The house gives physical form to that decision. It does not erase the distance between father and son; instead, its labor and memorial practices let Pietro approach a part of Giovanni that had remained inaccessible.

The mountain’s records extend that encounter beyond family memory. On a summit, Pietro finds a notebook in a metal box, its pages damaged by water and its entries left by the few climbers who reach the barren peak. Among them is Giovanni’s 1997 note: he had climbed from Grana in three hours and fifty-eight minutes and was still in great shape. Pietro imagines his father hurrying to finish in under four hours, but does not tear out the page; taking it would feel as sacrilegious as removing a summit stone. The contrast clarifies what the house does differently: rather than remove a fragment of the mountain, Pietro and Bruno make a place within it where memory can be kept and shared.

Shelter through winter

The house later offers Bruno somewhere to go when he does not know where else to be. He asks Pietro whether he can use the house at Barma, explaining that he does not want to see anyone and will spend some time in the mountains. In winter, the refuge is nearly swallowed by snow. Bruno has cleared the roof and dug a trench around the building, widening it into a small square before the door. Entering feels like going into a burrow; the window has become blind, with nothing visible beyond it but layers of white.

Snow striking the roof tiles with tremendous thuds makes the building’s vulnerability immediate. Pietro instinctively looks up, afraid the roof might collapse, while Bruno laughs and asks whether the rotten boards were properly repaired. The house is not an invulnerable monument: its survival depends on maintenance, and the danger that once worried its builders has returned as part of winter life. Inside, however, Bruno has added shelves and filled them with books, clothes, and tools. The room has acquired the quality of a lived-in home. Its transformation from open refuge to Bruno’s personal dwelling completes the house’s double purpose: it remains a place of shelter, while also holding the presence of the friend who helped build it.