The Weight She Carried: A Chronicle of the Mountain Markets

Looking for the Slow Life, trying to escape the hectic pace of our lives, is the dream of having a peaceful life like our ancestors. I'll tell you today what their life was really like. 

Your phone has buzzed seventeen times since you started reading this. Mine too. We live in an age where everything arrives instantly, yet nothing feels like it truly lands.

But let me take you somewhere else. To a woman I never met, walking a path I’ll never walk.

Three Days Up, Three Days Down

A friend told me about his grandmother. Every month, she would fill a wooden chest with whatever her hands had made—preserves, woven goods, vegetables from the terraced garden clinging to the mountainside. Then she would lift that chest onto her head and begin to walk.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-weight-she-carried-a-chronicle

Everyone Hates Cyclists (Except When They Don't)

 

The complex relationship Italians (and others) have with cycling, blending the charm of the race tradition with the tensions it creates. 

The roads through Valdengo wind their way toward the sanctuary of Oropa, like ribbons carelessly thrown across the Piedmont hills. Last Sunday, they belonged entirely to the cyclists—or more precisely, to the grand theater of Italian professional cycling, as the first edition of the TROFEO TESSILE e MODA VALDENGO – OROPA carved its way through these ancient textile valleys.

By mid-morning, the procession had already begun. First came the motorcycle outriders, their engines growling importantly. Then the police, lights flashing their blue authority across shuttered shops and closed intersections.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/everyone-hates-cyclists-except-when

The Garden That Teaches Us to Wait

This Sunday, I'll stand in a garden that took 140 years to become what it is. Not because anyone was slow. Because that's how long it takes to grow a masterpiece. 

I’m volunteering with FAI—Italy’s National Trust—at Villa Silvio Mosca in Biella, a place most tourists will never see.

Have you ever seen doorbells like this? Lovely!

It sits in the shadow of the Alps, in a town known for wool mills and rain. The kind of place many of us skip on our way to more photogenic destinations. But here’s what they’re missing: a lesson our accelerated world desperately needs.

In 1889, Silvio Mosca—an engineer who’d made his fortune in textiles—stood on a bare plot of land. He could have hired an architect. Instead, he drew the plans himself. For two years, he personally oversaw every stone, every tree placement, every sightline. He planted a cork oak, exotic and improbable in Piedmont’s climate. He positioned cedars where they’d frame the mountains just so. He created artificial hills to make a small garden feel infinite.

Then came the waiting.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-garden-that-teaches-us-to-wait

Tagliere — The Mountains' Shared Board

In Italy, time isn't chased—it's shared. The tagliere, a rustic wooden board laden with simple abundance, invites you to slow down, one bite at a time. 

Thermal Cures Through Time: Italy's Warm Histories, Northern Focus

 A Slow Life Chronicles exclusive: Where geological time meets human time, and where Italy's deepest secrets bubble up from the earth's ancient heart.

A Weekend in Acqui Terme: Time Slows Where Warm Waters Flow

In the Piedmont hills, where Romans once soaked their weary bones, a small town keeps ancient secrets bubbling just beneath the surface.

Mountains Are Born from The Graves of Oceans

Water that tastes of vanished oceans, flowing toward a sea that inherited the dreams of Tethys. The green stones of Monviso are not alone in their exile.

[Continued from "The Stone Heart of Italy"]

 

The Stone Heart of Italy

From the hills above Turin, from the ancient terraces of Biella, even on the clearest days, from the distant spires of Milan, one mountain alone commands the western horizon.

Not the highest peak in the Alps—that honor belongs to Mont Blanc—but the most imperious, the most solitary, the most impossible to ignore.

The Great Cornetto Divide: A Morning Ritual That Maps Italy's Soul

 There's a moment every morning in Italy when the country reveals one of its most charming contradictions.

The Devil of Piedmont

For many of us, Italy is sun-drenched piazzas, the gentle clink of wine glasses, and the slow, sweet rhythm of days that have unfolded the same way for centuries. It’s a romantic vision, but

But Italy, like any ancient place, is a palimpsest. Layers of beauty are written over layers of blood and iron.