A wall of rocks, a crown of not-so-snowy peaks piercing the sky, sometimes puncturing the clouds. This is what the Alps look like when you look at them from the plains: half menacing, half protective, definitely immovable and unbreakable. A clear border behind which, in my case, lies France.

The mountains of southern Piedmont, those of the province of Cuneo and Turin, are the ones I grew up with, often looking at them as if they were a screensaver, occasionally taking the trouble to go and get to know them more closely. And so it was that those mountains, almost abstract in their grandeur, began to fragment into flowering fields bustling with butterflies, pastures in which cows and their cowbells lazily dangle, stony ground that hides vipers in the sun, the shrill calls of marmots, and the gurgling of streams in search of an icy black lake.