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. 

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading this article https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-grove-where-god-went-dark-1

The Knights Without Fear And… (1)

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.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-knights-without-fear-and-1

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fog

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?

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and

Snowlit Milan City Chant

Milan, in this post’s focus, is a beautiful, snowy city, and its secrets are revealed here. 

We created this winter song inspired by photos of Milan and Moscow, me and Perplexity

Snowflakes dance on lamplight gold,

City veins in silver cold.
Windows glow, a whispered spell,
Evening's beauty, pure and fell.
Breathe the frost, embrace the night—
Winter's kiss, pure delight!

Continue with me on our discovery Milan walk here:

https://exegi.substack.com/p/snowlit-city-chant

To Pass Through the Fog

I wrote this story many years ago, when I was (yet again) in the situation described here. It's happened to me many times. But I still believe it's written accurately. A small, small, impossibly small man stood before a wall of fog.

It seemed the entire world lay ahead of him—a vast, impossible Universe rising from the earth at his feet and stretching into infinity. These clouds, so voluminous, like immense feather pillows, these billowing masses of fog.

Around him and behind, there was nothing. No one. He stood alone before the infinite. Leaving everything THERE.

There, far away, where no road led back, remained earthly life—so simple, so flawed, so comprehensible and familiar.

He caught himself not fully grasping the finality of this step.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/to-pass-through-the-fog

The Land Where Survival Was an Art Form

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.

I grabbed my keys.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-land-where-survival-was-an-art

A Tale of Tiny Steaks and Smaller Pastries

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. 

Through the Frosted Door: The Scandalous Skirts of Saint-Pierre

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.

Continue reading this story https://exegi.substack.com/p/through-the-frosted-door-the-scandalous

Italy’s ‘Child Queens,’ Sealed in Stone

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.

Messages in Stone: Getting Lost Among Prehistoric Secrets

A Sunday Walk Through 4,000 Years of Mystery (and Wild Boar Territory) in Bessa Natural Reserve, Piedmont

Sunday afternoon, trapped at my computer, the November sun mocking me through the window. Then salvation arrived via email: a package waiting at the Locker. Fifteen minutes there and back, I told myself. Just fifteen minutes.

But the day was impossibly beautiful—that rare late autumn gift when the light turns golden and you can feel winter’s approach making every warm hour precious. I had two, maybe three hours before it got dark. Where could I go?

My friend wasn’t home. The closest option was Vermogno, the Bessa park, where humans have been digging for gold for millennia. I’d walked there dozens of times, at least twice a year, always on the well-maintained trails. But this time, I noticed something new at the trailhead: a sign pointing toward “Percorso delle incisioni rupestri”—the path of prehistoric rock carvings.

Continue reading: https://exegi.substack.com/p/messages-in-stone-getting-lost-among

Where Triangles Point to Heaven

The wild boars weren't expecting company for dinner. Neither was I expecting to find myself clinging to a rocky slope in the Italian Alps.

 No proper path beneath my feet, just brambles and determination, chasing a mysterious temple that hung somewhere above my head like a promise. But that’s what happens when you follow Federico Rosazza’s ghost through the mountains near Biella.

In 1850s Italy, while most politicians were content with Rome’s marble corridors, Senator Federico Rosazza was building roads through impossible terrain. Not just any roads—sacred paths connecting the Sanctuary of Oropa to the Sanctuary of San Giovanni, including a tunnel carved through solid mountain. Along this route, perched on a scenic overlook that only a man possessed by grief and mysticism would choose, he built something strange: the Tempietto del Belvedere.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/where-triangles-point-to-heaven

The Viper's Flight: 1390 to 2025

What flies away is never truly lost. It only waits to be found again, to catch the light, to rest in someone’s palm and tell its story one more time.

Candelo’s main piazza (square) with one of the Ricetto towers

The archeologist’s trowel scraped through mud in Candelo’s main piazza and stopped. Something caught the light—a flash of silver pressed into earth that had held it for centuries.

He knelt, brushed carefully with fingers that knew how to coax history from dirt. A coin emerged: sesino di Gian Galeazzo, Milano 1390. The viper of the Visconti, fierce and unmistakable, is still visible after 635 years in darkness.

Late spring, 1390. The same piazza, but different.

Yesterday’s rain had finally stopped, leaving the world washed clean. The air tasted sweet. Ginevra emerged from the narrow cobbled street into the brightness of the square, and in her palm lay the sesino—warm from her hand, catching the morning sun like a small promise.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-vipers-flight-1390-to-2025