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“Vacation mode” — light, with some real notes on architecture and a couple of other people’s opinions to counterpoint my voice.
With this heat — when everything, quite literally, melts — everyone is looking for shelter somewhere. Some by the sea, some by the lake, some with their own clever tricks (share yours in the comments: how do you beat the heat?).
I decided to take a break from my usual “investigations” and simply stroll with you through Milano Centrale, the main railway station of Milan, taking in the Mussolini-era architecture and the general tourist traffic.
Near the pass and along the mule tracks leading up from Ceresole Reale, it is still possible to identify the ruins of the former barracks and stone military posts, - and the engravings
When the waiting finally ended
There’s a second date worth setting beside Chaberton’s, further along the same wall of concrete and silence, three years later. On the night of 8–9 September 1943, hours after Italy’s armistice with the Allies was announced, a GAF colonel named Giovanni Jon — a Piedmontese, in command at Tarvisio on the wall’s opposite end, facing not France but the sudden, unwanted new enemy of Germany — sounded the alarm and gathered his men on the barracks square. He read them Marshal Badoglio’s proclamation and told them, in effect, that their war was starting now. None of the roughly three hundred men present objected. They held the position against an attacking Waffen-SS regiment for six hours. Twenty-four of them died there; forty-eight more were wounded.
Emotional toll of Alpine Warfare. Look up. The mountains before you represent more than just indescribable beauty. They represent the pain and toil of their defenders.
Above Lago Agnel, at 2,300 metres, the ground stops pretending to be gentle. To the right, Punta Violetta climbs to 3,031 metres. To the left, lower and less dramatic, Colle Agnel sits at 2,510.
And somewhere between the two, tucked along the old military track before the Colle del Nivolet, a square of broken stone and concrete is still holding its shape against the mountain.
It doesn’t look like much. A collapsed wall here, a firing slit there, half-buried in rock that the retreating glaciers polished smooth ten thousand years before anyone thought to build on it. You could walk past it and mistake it for a shepherd’s ruin. It is, in fact, a listening post — a small fragment of one of the strangest defensive projects Italy ever attempted: the Vallo Alpino del Littorio.
A wall that was never tested
In 1931, with the memory of the First World War still raw and the newly built Maginot Line rising across the French border, Mussolini’s general staff ordered the construction of a defensive system that would eventually stretch the length of Italy’s Alpine border — from Ventimiglia on the Ligurian coast to Fiume on the Adriatic. It was meant to make the frontier, in the language of the original directives, “hermetic.” Impenetrable.
A classic survival yarn: the mountain has been testing people who think they own a piece of it
Up on the plateau, where everyone goes, there are lakes scattered everywhere. Normal people climb up from Rifugio Savoia and walk straight ahead, toward whichever lake the trail signs point to that day.
I, as usual, did not do what normal people do. I decided I wanted to see the other lakes — the ones off to the right, the ones nobody mentions.
It seemed only fair to start at the rifugio, since the rifugio itself is not quite what it looks like. Today, it’s a place where you buy a coffee and a slice of cake before a hike. A century and a half ago, it was a royal hunting lodge — one of the wooden houses Vittorio Emanuele II had built across this plateau in the 1860s, after declaring the entire Gran Paradiso massif his private hunting reserve. The king wanted the ibex for himself, and he wanted it badly enough to ban anyone else from touching it. It is one of those details history hands you for free: the same selfish decree that let one man shoot as many ibex as he liked is the reason the species survived at all, while it vanished from the rest of the Alps.
This is the story that transforms a mystical, dark legend into something even more disturbing, because it removes the supernatural and replaces it with reality, which is worse. MUCH worse.
There is a place in Piedmont where the name itself cannot make up its mind.
Lucedio. Say it slowly. Luce — light. From the Latin lux, the same root that gave us Lucifer, the morning star, the bringer of light, before he fell. The monks who arrived here in 1123 preferred a gentler etymology: lucus Dei, the grove of God. A sacred clearing in the wilderness.
They had come from Burgundy, from the monastery of La Ferté, and they were Cistercians — the reformers, the disciplinarians, the White Monks who had founded their order precisely because other monasteries had grown slack and worldly. They believed in silence, manual labour, and the absolute primacy of prayer. They were, by all accounts, serious people.
The Rise and Hollow Fall of the Frichignono. Much more than just a name in a dusty ledger.
The tunnel does not merely lead you underground; it swallows you.
The vaulted stone ceiling presses down with the weight of a thousand years, the air turning cold and damp — the temperature of a held breath.
Ahead, a dim amber glow flickers; behind you, a darkness so thick and deliberate it feels like a physical presence. You find yourself walking faster. Everyone does. This is where the castle keeps its oldest secrets, and in Castellengo, secrets have a habit of refusing to stay buried.
The stones here have been watching people arrive since the Middle Ages, but they learned a different kind of silence after the Frichignono arrived. As you walk, the echo of your own footsteps begins to drift. The rhythm falters. It’s a classic trick of the acoustics — or perhaps it’s the sound of the fourteen original noble clans who were slowly, methodically bled out of their inheritance to make room for one name.
Historical detective: a silent record left by women who had no other voice.
Stand on the hill of Castellengo Castle and look down. The plain spreads out endlessly before you, flat and quiet.
But look closer, just below the castle hill: there is a church. The Church of Saints Peter and Paul sits there as it has for centuries, and even from a distance, something about it feels odd. Its back faces the road. It turns away from you, as if keeping a secret.
That oddness is, in fact, a very precise statement.
Churches were built for people who could not read. Every stone, every orientation, every image was a lesson written in a language older than words. This one follows the ancient rule: the altar faces east, toward the rising sun at dawn. Because Christ was imagined as the sun, the light that conquers darkness. So the faithful entered from the west, from shadow, from what the builders called death, and walked forward toward the light. The door was never meant to face the road. It was meant to face the dark.
At Castello di Castellengo, a glass of Nebbiolo is not just a drink — it is a conversation with four million years of history. And it begins with a very steep climb.
You already know the stones.
If you read Part 1 and Part 2 of the Castellengo story, you know about Alberico, who crossed all of Italy with nothing but a name and a sword. You know about the political tragedy sealed into the limestone. You know the rough, primitive bones of the original fort — the stones that records erase but land never does.
But there is something I didn’t tell you yet.
Those same stones, those same medieval walls, are today the cellar of a wine that challenges time itself.
Before the tourists arrive and the season truly begins, Italy belongs, for a few precious days, to its farmers. Every spring, Italy exhales. And somewhere in that first warm breath, you will find a farmer’s fair.
There is something quietly magical about the agricultural fairs that mark the arrival of spring in Italy.
Long before the first warm days settle in, farmers begin preparing — combing, grooming, loading their most prized animals into trailers — and the whole countryside seems to hold its breath in anticipation.
The undisputed stars of these fairs are the cows. They arrive knowing their worth. Washed with the finest shampoos, udders carefully tended, coats brushed until they gleam — they carry themselves with the serene dignity of royalty, because that is exactly what they are here. They nuzzle each other, accept affection without fuss, and survey the crowds with calm, dark eyes that seem to say: yes, this is all for us.
The “Pragmatic Nobles” who used diplomacy and Church alliances to rule for 400+ years. Dynasty that would learn to survive by being much ‘smarter’ than the rebel Alberico but… TOO much
The confiscation of 1014 was not the end of Castellengo. It was, in retrospect, only the prologue.
Part II: The Pragmatic Heirs — The Mystery of the Postern Gate
Into the space Alberico left behind stepped the De Bulgaro — a family who had looked at his fate and drawn a very different set of conclusions about how to survive in a world of kings and emperors.
Who Were the Bulgaro?
The name sounds foreign, and it raised eyebrows even then, but the De Bulgaro were almost certainly Lombard or Frankish — part of the great consortile tradition, clan-based families who held property collectively across multiple branches, like a corporation with a coat of arms. They were also crucially aligned with the Bishop of Vercelli, which made them the Emperor’s men by proxy, making them legally untouchable.
Every castle has its ghost. At Castellengo, the ghost isn’t a specter drifting through corridors in the small hours — it’s a political tragedy, sealed into the limestone like a man walled up alive.
Before the grand balconies, before the cellars heavy with wine, there was only a cliff, a river, and a man with a loyalty that would cost him everything.
Part I: The Exile’s Gamble — From the Tiber to the Alps
The story does not begin here.
It begins five hundred kilometers to the south, in the sun-hammered hills of Umbria, where a man named Alberico stood in the shadow of the Castello di Monterone and grasped, with the cold clarity that only younger sons ever know, that none of this would ever be his.
Winter has finally arrived in Biella, and I find myself in the peculiar position of wanting snow. After 22 years of southern living, this is character development I never saw coming.
Snow in Biella is a rare guest — arriving perhaps once or twice, staying for a polite day or two before disappearing, as if it had forgotten an important appointment elsewhere.
But this year? This year, I’m craving it
The Almost-Adventure
The walking group chat has been exploding with snow photos — gorgeous, postcard-perfect shots that make you want to lace up your boots immediately. So last Saturday, after a fresh snowfall dusted the city, I thought: Today’s the day. I’m going to the mountains.
I had errands to run first. No problem. Plenty of time for a little mountain walk afterward. Then I looked up.
Above the peaks: massive, brooding, seriously uninviting dark gray clouds.
My enthusiasm deflated like a sad balloon. Where exactly was I planning to go in that?
There’s something about Italy that makes people want to believe in magic again. On witch-hunts, wish-granting, and what happens when modern women chase ancient magic
There is a walnut tree that grows over a gorge in the mountains between Salerno and Benevento. I know this because I danced around it with four other women on a Thursday afternoon, and the universe answered back.
I was writing a text for prospects, agricultural companies, offering them a promotion of their products – vegetables, meat, honey, wine... Suddenly, I had the idea to tell it to you as a parable...
Life in Italy was never easy. Virtually every place and every period could be included in a survival manual. Let's talk about castle secrets again. Once upon a time, there was a castle...
“How do we get into that castle?”
The car had stopped beside us on the hill. We looked up at the ruin—another forgotten Avogadro fortress, crumbling behind rusted gates and NO TRESPASSING signs.
“You can’t,” I said.
The driver nodded and drove off, but the question stayed with me. How do you get in? And more than that: why are there so many castles here that nobody can get into, that nobody even knows about?
It was one of those winter days you wait for all season—actual sunshine, breaking through weeks of fog and rain. I had maybe three hours before the light died, and I was desperate to escape my own head. So I did what any reasonable person does: I opened Google Maps and typed “castles.”
Three popped up. Close together. A loop I could drive in an afternoon.
Every year between Christmas and New Year's, my friends and I engage in what has become our sacred ritual: eating our way through Piedmont while pretending we're not just avoiding their in-laws.
Guarded by carved oak against winter's bite, a bas-relief freezes 1400s nobility: stern lords flank ladies in shockingly short tunics. No trailing velvet trains; these hems skim the knee. Why?
This story is my interpretation of the Saint-Pierre bas-relief on a door in the castle. Tourists visiting the castle do not notice its protagonists, and the guides don’t know what to say to you. They did not see it really. But there is an answer: medieval life was not quite the same as we imagine it from the ceremonial medieval pictures.
The October wind had teeth that morning when Caterina de Challant slipped through the postern gate of Ussel, her mare already saddled and stamping in the shadows. Behind her, in the castle’s great hall, her uncle’s men would be arriving within the hour, riding up the main road with documents and armed escorts, ready to strip her of yet another inheritance. But Caterina had learned to read the rhythms of ambush and lawsuit as other women read psalters.
Across northern Italy, some of the oldest stones in the region hold secrets from a distant past, where children were interred with reverence and ceremony.
The path through the woods above Roppolo is carpeted in copper leaves, and the winter light falls thin through the bare chestnuts.
Twenty-six kilometers separate Biella from Ivrea, but they might as well be centuries apart.
I’ve already told you about Ivrea—the city that dreamed outward, that built its utopia around Olivetti’s vision, that wanted the world to see what it had created. Biella chose differently. When the textile industry that defined it for generations disappeared, Biella didn’t dream of the future. It turned inward.
There was once a sign at the city entrance—or maybe it’s a legend that captures the truth better than facts ever could—that read something like: “Welcome to Biella—but no one’s expecting you.” In 2018, statistics confirmed what the sign suggested: Biella was officially Italy’s least attractive city, the place no one wanted to move to.
Walk into any landscape that's bigger and more powerful than you are—any mountain, any ocean, any desert, any forest dark enough to remind you that you're not actually in control—and boot up.
