Grana is an Alpine village marked by depopulation and abandonment, but not emptied of meaning. Its derelict homes, school, paths, and pastures register the costs of mountain life and the retreat of its residents; its seasonal rhythms and surviving routes also make it a setting where work, family history, and Pietro’s changing sense of belonging meet.

Depopulation and the Abandoned Village

When Pietro and Bruno were children, they explored Grana’s disused buildings while keeping close to Bruno’s grazing cows. Old stables, haylofts, granaries, a shop with empty, dust-covered shelves, and a smoke-blackened bread oven still held scattered remnants of domestic life: a table and bench, crockery, glasses, or a pan above a fireplace. In 1984, only fourteen people lived in the village, compared with as many as one hundred in the past. The abandoned rooms suggested not a clean break but a gradual withdrawal: some had apparently been occupied poorly for a time after they fell out of use, then left for good.

The village school condensed that decline into a single building. More imposing than the surrounding houses, it had three white-plastered floors, an external staircase, and a walled courtyard breached by weeds. Inside, rabbits now occupied cages in the former schoolroom, among hay, animal feed, and other signs of its changed use. The crucifix remained on the far wall, while desks had been pushed against it. A building once organized around education had become part of the village’s improvised agricultural life, its earlier purpose still visible but no longer active.

The decay extended beyond individual structures. Pietro found a ruined building near the lake, its small room vandalized and its belongings scattered among rubbish; he meant to salvage its stove before the roof collapsed further. Nearby stood the remains of a much older Alpine farmstead, once a complex of separate buildings with stone stairs and massive roof beams. Only rain-scoured walls remained. Together these ruins show different scales of abandonment, from a modest dwelling to a substantial settlement, and make the village’s past legible through what has survived rather than through a continuous inhabited community.

Seasonal Work and the Return of Activity

Grana’s population and landscape did not remain equally still throughout the year. As summer approached, workers prepared the stables, moved equipment with tractors, and readied the lower valley for the herds that would soon be taken uphill. The return of cattle would repopulate those lower reaches, giving the village a seasonal pulse amid its longer decline. Pietro recognized this cycle from his childhood, when summer had seemed permanent and the mountain appeared to wait for his return.

Bruno’s farm became a conspicuous renewal of that activity. After a winter with little snow, he brought twenty-eight pregnant dairy cows to the piazza in Grana on the first Saturday of June. Bruno, his mother, Lara, Pietro, and two black herding dogs contained the unsettled animals as they came off the truck, then guided them up the mule track. The dogs brought stragglers back to the group; Bruno led from the front, while Pietro followed behind. The herd passed derelict huts, weed-broken stone walls, and felled larches. For Pietro, the procession resembled a body beginning to circulate again: the work did not erase the ruins, but temporarily filled the valley’s old routes with movement and sound.

Later, when Pietro returned to the farmstead for lunch, its liveliness had become part of everyday life. Bruno, Lara, and their daughter Anita were there, as was Pietro’s mother; chickens, rabbits, a mule, cows, and dogs surrounded a meal being prepared over a fire. The open-air table and active farm stood in marked contrast to the abandoned school and empty houses. Grana’s return to life was real but localized, sustained by the labor and commitments of one household rather than by any evidence that the village as a whole had regained its former population.

Routes, Records, and Family Memory

The paths around Grana connect the village to Pietro’s family history. His father’s mountain map, still pinned in the family kitchen after twenty years, had become a dense record of routes across the valley, reaching summits, alpine pastures, and refuges. Pietro interpreted its black, red, and green lines as records of his father’s climbs alone or with Pietro and Bruno. The map made the mountains around Grana more than a landscape: it preserved journeys and relationships that Pietro had not fully understood while growing up.

A summit notebook gave that history another form. On a climb from his house, Pietro found his father Giovanni Guasti’s 1997 entry recording an ascent from Grana in three hours and fifty-eight minutes, followed by a note that he was still in great shape. The entry placed Giovanni on the same barren mountain Pietro had climbed and made the route measurable in both distance and time. Pietro imagined his father hurrying to reach the summit in under four hours, but the record itself offered a smaller, more concrete trace: a name, a time, and a brief expression of satisfaction preserved among the sparse entries of other climbers.

Returning to Grana also alters Pietro’s relation to the place. After a month of walking down the road each morning, he regained some of his former speed and found himself attending again to the valley’s changing seasons. On his way back up, he paused by the lake beneath Grenon, where the basin remained in shadow before the sun reached it. He could no longer clearly account for why he had once distanced himself from the mountain, but his repeated solitary climbs gradually helped him make peace with it. Grana and its surrounding routes thus become part of a personal return: not simply a recovered childhood setting, but a place in which Pietro feels more fully himself.

Change and the Persistence of Place

Grana’s surroundings also bear the marks of newer development and neglect. On a later journey, Pietro found a mobile-phone mast beside the ruins of a tower and a cement dam interrupting the river in a gully. Mud from the thaw filled the reservoir; an excavator removed it and damaged the meadows where Bruno had grazed cattle as a boy. Elsewhere, remnants of an old sawmill and a cable lift remained, the steel cable partly engulfed by a larch. The contrast between new infrastructure and forgotten mountain work complicates any simple picture of an untouched landscape: the village’s apparent remoteness exists alongside physical changes that can diminish the pastures and routes on which older livelihoods depended.

For Pietro, however, the place’s neglect also helps preserve an attachment to it. Beyond Grana, the old sawmill clearing and its obsolete equipment remain because the childhood mountain has been treated as having little value. Each return to the area leads him back toward a version of himself he recognizes. The ruins make loss visible, while paths, maps, livestock, and climbing records keep parts of the village’s working and familial history in circulation. Grana’s significance lies in that tension: its former life is receding, yet the place continues to shape how its absent and returning inhabitants understand home, memory, and themselves.