Guglielmina alpine pasture on Grenon is a summer farmstead above Grana mountain village, made up of three mountain shacks reached by a track climbing the valley. It is Bruno’s home and workplace, a setting where the narrator first encounters the material demands of Alpine farming as well as the intimacy and strain bound up in the place. Over time, the farmstead’s working life gives way to visible ruin; its changing condition sharpens the book’s contrast between the mountain as a source of attachment and the economic realities of remaining there.

Setting and Access

The farmstead lies about an hour’s walk from Grana mountain village, on the right flank of a deep valley. The route passes a stream the narrator already loves, then enters a basin crowded with small waterways, ferns, rhubarb bushes, and nettles. The ground is boggy through the wetland; beyond the river, the path climbs into sunshine and reaches maintained pastures. The contrast between waterlogged valley and cared-for grazing land makes the farmstead feel like a distinct working territory reached by leaving the village behind.

The three huts sit where the mountain briefly becomes less steep before dropping again toward the stream. In summer, they are part of the seasonal movement of people and animals up the valley. Bruno says that he will join his uncle and older cousins there in August, bringing the younger cows left below. His father, by contrast, spends much of the year away at building sites and returns rarely, usually in winter. The farmstead therefore belongs to a livelihood shaped by both seasonal herding and labor away from the village.

Buildings and Work

When the narrator visits with his father, the group has not seen Bruno for fifteen days. Bruno greets them, and his uncle offers toma cheese, mocetta salami, and wine, though his wary expression sits uneasily beside the hospitable gesture. The farmstead itself carries two histories at once: the dignity of old stonework and hand-hewn roof beams, and the more recent poverty visible in its upkeep. One long cabin is a cowshed, thick with flies and dung; another, with broken windows stopped by rags and a roof patched with metal sheets, is where Luigi Guglielmina and his heirs live. The third is a cellar, which Bruno chooses to show the narrator instead of the room where he sleeps. Even in the village he has not invited his friend into his home.

The cellar is unexpectedly clean and cool, its thick larch shelves recently washed. Round cheeses age there, their crusts moistened with brine and their surfaces polished and symmetrical. Bruno is learning to make toma, though at this stage he turns the cheeses, salts them weekly, and washes and tidies the cellar rather than making them himself. The care concentrated in this room stands out against the disorder outside: plastic buckets, rotting wood, a stove made from a diesel-oil drum, and a bathtub repurposed as a drinking trough. The difference is not simply between clean and dirty spaces. It shows the labor invested in a valuable product beside a broader neglect of buildings and possessions.

Economic Pressure and Decline

Luigi Guglielmina explains that small Alpine farms no longer make economic sense under current prices and what he regards as absurd cattle-breeding regulations. He continues because he is passionate about the work, while recognizing that his heirs do not want the exhausting labor it requires. He predicts that within ten years of his death the land will revert to forest. The farmstead thus appears not as an untouched pastoral refuge but as a livelihood under pressure, dependent on work that the next generation may be unwilling or unable to continue.

Years later, the narrator finds the farmstead in worse condition. One hut’s roof has caved in and forced out the wall supporting its beams; the rusting bath remains outside the stable, and doors have been taken off their hinges and left against a wall. Larch saplings are spreading through the pastures, an image that recalls Luigi’s prediction. The narrator wonders what has happened to Bruno’s uncle, but Bruno does not stop, and they continue without speaking. The abandoned path and failing buildings register more than neglect: the working landscape is losing the people and care that once kept it open.

A Proposed Future and a Place of Memory

Before the farmstead’s later decline, Bruno imagines taking it over. He has saved money, spent his savings on a down payment, and hopes to borrow the rest from a bank after his cousins set a price. His stay at Barma has served as a trial run for living and working in the mountains. He plans to rebuild the huts, buy cattle, and have the farm operating within a few years. This is a proposal rather than an accomplished restoration, and the later decay makes the distance between his plan and the farmstead’s condition plain.

The proposal also exposes the limits of treating attachment as a solution to economic hardship. Much later, Lara recalls that when the farm was plainly unviable, she had been prepared to sell the cows, rent out the farmstead, and find ordinary jobs until circumstances improved. Bruno rejected the possibility of an alternative life. In her account, the farm and the mountain had become priorities that outweighed the future she had imagined for herself and Anita. The farmstead is therefore not only a family inheritance or a landscape to repair; it is also the setting of a conflict over what kind of life can be chosen and who bears its costs.

For the narrator, the farmstead first belongs to childhood visits and to Bruno’s invitation into a world of cows, cheese, and mountain huts. Its material changes later become part of a wider recognition that mountain places survive through work and memory, not through scenery alone. The farmstead’s clean cheese cellar, patched roofs, returning forest, and unrealized rebuilding plan hold those forces together: affection for the high pastures remains real, but so do the labor, poverty, and uncertainty that complicate the dream of staying there.