Home » Exercise of admiration of a mule track, from Torre Daniele to Chiaverina

Exercise of admiration of a mule track, from Torre Daniele to Chiaverina

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A widespread and hidden stone town from Settimo Vittone to Carema. Gotta: “Vineyards like colonnades of roofless temples”

SEVENTH VICTON. I take one step after another on this mule track that from Torre Daniele climbs very steeply between terraces and vineyards towards Chiaverina, in one of the most beautiful and surprising views of our land: from Settimo Vittone to Carema, and beyond, a widespread and hidden city of stone that generations of men and women have imposed on the mountain with a tenacious and ingenious work.

The cool blue morning sky seems incapable of threats, yet it is the same one that three days ago ruined the nearby crops with its sudden hail, hateful as an undeserved punishment. But it is precisely tenacity that is the secret of this small world built by hand, which still today thrives on non-mechanizable viticulture: it always knows how to get up again, as it has done a thousand times in its centuries-old history and as it always will.

The landscape in front of me is so unique as to instill hope: for this reason, I think, if there is a greater danger than the unpredictable sky, it is all in our distraction. In its first article, the European Landscape Convention says: «The landscape is a specific part of the territory, as it is perceived by the populations, whose character derives from the action of natural and human factors and from their interactions». What does it mean? That beauty also comes from the quality of our eyes; that the landscape is disfigured when we ignore it; that our insensitivity towards it is beautiful and good pollution, because we love what we recognize, we protect what we love and neglect the rest.

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The chestnut forest is now thickening, a ray of sunshine falls on this mule track which is a masterpiece: it enhances the quartz of the stones that make up its central steps in a perfect line, making them shine in the presence of the other opaque pebbles, creating a shimmery streak that’s a unwrapped gift.

Here is a collective and master’s work, a real infrastructure, which helped the farmer with the pannier on his shoulder to climb or descend on a regular slope, over the jumps and irregularities of the mountain; but here, too, a work that went beyond its simple function, where the grace of ladders, bridges, channels for rainwater, dry stone walls was not accidental, it came from the love for work well done and for the prestige that ensued in the community.

I walked in peace in many places, on the paths of some Apennines, in the windy perimeter of a Greek island: I have never found in this crazy degree the disinterest, the generosity, the aesthetic sense of those who built our mule tracks. The vocation to the masterpiece that comes to us from our masters, even those unknown as a winemaker from Cesnola a hundred years ago, is a heritage that can make a beautiful walk an enlightening educational experience. As long as we know how to renew our gaze, our “perceptions”, also feeding ourselves on words and images of the author, which are the most effective admiration exercises we have. This is why I leave you with Salvator Gotta, a Montaltese writer who in a text by eighty years ago it seems to describe my descent home, now:

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“Tradition is one and marks the region’s boundaries so sharp and formidable that it will never be possible to break down. The one hundred and twenty municipalities, from above and below, tend to Ivrea as children tend their souls and arms to their mothers. The four great roads not only, but the innumerable alleys, the paths, the tratturi, down to rocky precipices, between vineyards, fields and along promontories of ditches, go towards the capital with natural direction and joyful care, like all waters they go towards the sea. And the closer you get to the turreted city, the more the horizon widens, the green laughs, the characteristic Canavese green, which seems of velvet so thick are the grasses, the leaves, the mosses. Precious land, all cultivated up to where there is a mouthful of it perched on the rocks. The vineyards are all pergolas supported by masonry pillars, plastered, so white that they can be seen from afar and adorn the slopes of the hills and the mountain like colonnades of roofless temples. And where there is a vineyard there is a house ». marco peroni

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