The Widows of the Frontier: Waiting for a War That Never Came (1)

 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.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-widows-of-the-frontier-waiting

It Takes Very Little to Become a Believer, in the Alps

 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. 

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https://exegi.substack.com/p/it-takes-very-little-to-become-a

The Grove Where God Went Dark

 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.

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The Town 40 Minutes from Turin That Every Expat Misses

 Choosing between a big city and a small town in Italy involves significant trade-offs regarding cost, career opportunities, and social integration. Here: Confrontation outlines of pros and cons

Two kinds of expats move to small-town Italy. The ones who romanticise it so hard they forget to check whether there’s a pharmacy within 30 kilometres. And the ones who actually stick around.

I’ve been living in this area for a few years now, and I’ll be honest: I go out alone most of the time. I called a friend to come with me to see a menhir in Mazzè last week. She wasn’t feeling well. Called another. Too busy. I didn’t even call the third one because I already know that her partner, now retired and living with her, doesn’t look favorably on her friends.

This is not a complaint — it’s just the reality of adult social life, anywhere in the world. The difference is that in a small Italian town, the loneliness can hit harder when you don’t speak the language yet, and the community feels impenetrable. But it’s not, and Mazzè is actually only a good example to speak of why.

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Like a Lost Soul

 The miracle of wanting to go somewhere again, after months of numbness.

The car thudded. Then it creaked. Then — I swear — it meowed. And then it stopped.

I was somewhere on a mountain road, sixty or seventy kilometers from home, and I felt the familiar cold hand of dread. This is it. Tonight I’ll sleep in the car. I have mandatory insurance, but the kind that looks good on paper and doesn’t quite reach you when you’re stranded on a cliff at dusk.

But my old Mitsubishi — God bless the hands that built her and the soul that gave her to me — had paused for dramatic effect. A breath. A theatrical moment. Because that is her character, she is battered and dented and beloved, and she has taken me places no sensible vehicle would agree to go. I stroked her roof and told her she was magnificent. My golden hen. My mountain witch.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-road-that-meowed-and-stopped