Home » A life among European sovereigns and Piedmontese songs: a journey into the Sacred Valley by Costantino Nigra

A life among European sovereigns and Piedmontese songs: a journey into the Sacred Valley by Costantino Nigra

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A beautiful melee with the mountain between views and hairpin bends, where you can reflect on the meaning of our history

CASTELNUOVO NIGRA. The sun rose behind us a few minutes ago, the shadows precede us long and we pedal in the direction of Villa Castelnuovo. Davide has always been a friend and a long-time cyclist, so this morning it’s his turn to guide me from Ivrea up there. Immediately it is a bit fast, but at a touch it regulates itself fraternally.

In Colleretto we turn right and begin to climb. Two, three curves and an illustrious house greets us on the left, with a lapidary plaque: «Giuseppe Giacosa was born, worked, died here». The morainic amphitheater begins to reveal itself in its design while the slope slowly imposes silence on us.

I expect an idea for the article from this round. I could start with the things that I do not explain: as a boy born in 1828, without noble titles and just hired by the Foreign Ministry by competition, did to make himself indispensable first in D’Azeglio and then in Cavour; to carry out the design of the latter on a secret mission to Paris, not even thirty years old, juggling Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenia de Montijo with different arguments and the same outcome; to start between 1854 and 1860, therefore in the midst of that “storm”, studies on Piedmontese popular music which will later become an international reference in the field.

We go up again but I’m not too bad. Finally we reach the dam, we skirt the lake of Gurzia and catching my breath I enjoy the postcard. Then we take a left and after the bridge and the waterfall we really whip our legs. We are in the woods, in a beautiful melee with the mountain between panoramas and hairpin bends. The air is dry, the earth is demanding rain which is expected in the evening. The climb is rigor, slowness, intuitions are given up for concepts. I brood. For Nigra I could start from that of Nobility, telling of the title of Count given to him by Umberto I in 1882, so blue had his diplomatic career been; or from that of Devozione, recounting when in 1894 he bought and destroyed the letters written by Cavour to his lover with “sudden abandonment”, to protect the memory of his master.

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But an hour later I start looking for the end of the climb with my eyes and the bike has become an instrument of torture. I fight until, cheers, we cross. And here we are in the Sacred Valley. We meet in sequence the small cemetery where Nigra has rested since 1907, the monument that his daughter-in-law had built for him, the disintegrated villa that sends a kind of scream. We have earned everything, let’s browse calmly. In front of the church of the Assumption we have fun in the sun and pulverize our sandwiches in a beautiful setting.

Yet as for inspiration I remained at the stake, Nigra seems taller than Quinzeina. What do I think I’m saying? The essay comes to mind On the usefulness and harm of history for life by Friedrich Nietzsche: «Epochs and generations have no reason to be judges of all previous epochs and generations. As a judge you should stand higher than the judge; while you only came later. ‘

The forces are back, we reach Sale Castelnuovo where we put on the shirts for the dive. Davide sways, detaches me, bends right and left, goes without hands for long stretches, at 70 kilometers per hour he deflects a hole at the last moment and signals it to me by pulling up his arm. My heart rises to my throat. But when the landscape after two or three curves opens onto Issiglio, with the sun making the slates sparkle, the bell tower touching the two and the horses in the green meadows, I have a sudden, sweet, long emotion. The postcard now comes to me from the future and I imagine this land that thrives in friendship, health, and a thousand other different, hardworking and communicating in a healed country.

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«Form in yourselves an image to which the future must correspond and forget the superstition of being epigones. You have enough to devise and invent; but don’t ask history to show you the way and the means ».

Notes for this evening, from this slight slope: what could our teachers be? More than documents, clay; more than monuments, tuning forks to tune a common wind. An impulse towards completely new enterprises, of those «that never succeed without a little bit of illusion». –

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