Tre Cime di Lavaredo

Tre Cime di Lavaredo is where Pietro’s parents married, making the mountain setting central to the family’s origin story. At a small chapel at its foot, their earlier life in the mountains became the beginning of a new family life in Milan.

Setting and Family History

For Pietro’s parents, the Dolomites were their first mountains and the setting of their first love. They had been taken there as adolescents by a priest who later married them. As Pietro gradually understood, the wedding at Tre Cime di Lavaredo joined the place where their relationship began to the place where their family took shape.

The Wedding

The ceremony took place on a Saturday morning in October 1972, in front of the chapel at the mountain’s foot. The couple’s relatives did not attend: Pietro’s maternal grandparents boycotted the wedding for reasons he did not know, and a later account recalls that the family refused the invitations. The bride and groom were accompanied by a handful of friends, wearing anoraks rather than wedding clothes. They spent their first night as husband and wife in a bed at the Auronzo refuge, while snow already gleamed on the ledges of Cima Grande.

Departure and Significance

The next day, the couple packed their leather climbing boots and plus fours into the car, along with the bride’s pregnancy and the contract for the groom’s new job, and drove to Milan. The mountain wedding thus marked both attachment to the parents’ shared past and departure from it. For Pietro, it became the family’s foundational myth: a story in which love, mountain life, and the start of a new household were inseparable.