A Hike to Rifugio Fratelli Longo and Lago Diavolo from Carona

Overview ~ The Route ~ Resistance ~ Rifugio Longo ~ 

Water, Dams, and Electricity ~ A Final Thought ~ Flora

  

Left: View from the Lago Diavolo dam looking west.

Center: View from trail 208 - looking east.
Right: Rifugio Longo with green backdrop.

On a warm July Sunday, we headed up to Alta Val Brembana for a hike to Rifugio Fratelli Longo and Lago Diavolo. We stopped in Branzi (of cheese fame) for a coffee before continuing on to Carona and parking.

Starting in Carona, we followed a combination of CAI trails 210, 209, 208, 224, and 258 in a loop that took us through forests, past reservoirs and waterfalls, and into one of the most historically interesting valleys in the Bergamasque Alps. The hike ended, as many of our hikes do, with an excellent lunch at the rifugio. This is one of the few rifugi we haven’t been to in the Orobie, so it was nice to get a chance to visit.

Overview

Length: 19.7 km
Elevation Gain: ~1,010 m
Duration: 7 hours total including lunch, 4 hours 51 minutes moving time
Highest Point: 2,142 m
Starting Point: Carona (1,189 m)
Destination: Rifugio Fratelli Longo (2,026 m) and Lago Diavolo

The Route

We started in Carona (here) on CAI trail 210, a mostly paved service road that climbs steadily into the valley. Around the third kilometer we left the road and took CAI trail 209, a forest trail that climbs through the trees to meet trail 208, the Sentiero delle Orobie Occidentali. From there we continued on trail 224 to Rifugio Longo.

After reaching the rifugio, we continued up to Lago Diavolo, one of the iconic alpine lakes of the Orobie. The lake sits beneath rugged peaks and beside a dam that today holds back the alpine waters. Today, the lake looked pretty low to our eyes. 

We returned to the rifugio for lunch before descending on trail 258, a narrower and more interesting trail that drops into the valley and follows portions of an old aqueduct before reconnecting with trail 208 and eventually Carona.

One of the highlights of the day was encountering a large herd of Bergamasca Sheep. Seeing roughly 1,500 animals spread on a steep slope under the trees felt like stepping into another century. The Bergamasca breed originated in the valleys around Bergamo and remains closely associated with pastoral life in Val Brembana. The shepherd spoke a broken Italian indicating he was from somewhere else. Our Italian friends hinted he might be of Balkan origin.

Resistance 

A recurring theme on this hike was the difference between taking "the road" and taking "the trail." 

A few of our Italian companions generally favored the obvious and established route. Suggestions to deviate from the main trail, whether by taking trail 209 through the forest or making a detour to see the dam and lake, were initially met with skepticism. Once the alternative route revealed a hidden view, an interesting landscape feature, or some unexpected beauty, enthusiasm returned.  

Yet the next suggestion for a detour often triggered the same debate all over again. 

Perhaps this is one of those universal hiking truths: many hikers want certainty, while others are willing to trade certainty for curiosity. On this day, curiosity won some battles but not all of them.  

Rifugio Fratelli Longo 

The rifugio sits at 2,026 meters in the Valle del Monte Sasso and is one of the classic destinations in the Orobie Bergamasche. The rifugio is named after Giuseppe and Innocente Longo, two Bergamasque brothers who died while climbing the Matterhorn (Val d’Aosta) in 1934. 

The history of the rifugio is intertwined with that of nearby Rifugio Calvi. A mountain hut was originally constructed in this area by the CAI Bergamo section in 1923 and dedicated to the four Calvi brothers. Following damage and neglect during World War II, a larger rifugio was built elsewhere in the valley, becoming today's Rifugio Calvi. The older structure was renovated and rededicated to the Longo brothers, giving rise to the current Rifugio Fratelli Longo. 

Today, Longo serves hikers traversing the western Orobie and climbers heading toward passes that connect Val Brembana with Valtellina. Despite its remote location, it remains a welcoming place for a meal and conversation. During our visit, we chatted with the manager, who mentioned her son was preparing for a trip to Los Angeles, Death Valley, and Las Vegas. Small connections like that are one reason rifugi remain special places. 

Water, Dams, and Electricity 

The valley above Carona looks wild today, but much of its modern appearance was shaped by hydroelectric development during the twentieth century. 

Beginning in the early 1900s, the growing industrial centers of Bergamo and Milan needed electricity. The high valleys of the Orobie, with abundant snowfall (back then), steep gradients, and natural basins, were ideal for hydroelectric production. A series of dams, tunnels, reservoirs, and aqueducts were constructed throughout the area around Carona. 

Lago del Prato, Lago Marcio, Lago del Diavolo, Lago Fregabolgia, Lago del Sardegnana, and other reservoirs became part of an interconnected system designed to capture and move water efficiently through the mountains. Some of the trails hikers use today originated as service roads for dam construction and maintenance. The old aqueduct section we followed on trail 258 is a reminder that much of the valley's infrastructure was built not for recreation but for moving water. 

The dams dramatically altered the landscape while also preserving a visible record of twentieth-century engineering. Standing near Lago Diavolo, it is hard not to admire the ambition required to build large concrete structures in such a remote alpine environment long before modern construction equipment could be easily transported into the mountains. 

Today, hikers pass through a landscape where natural and human history coexist. Alpine lakes, shepherds, and centuries-old mountain traditions share the same valley with dams, tunnels, and hydroelectric infrastructure that helped power Lombardy's industrial growth. 

A Final Thought

We enjoyed this hike more than we expected. The combination of forests, reservoirs, alpine scenery, sheep, mountain history, and good food made for an excellent day in the Orobie. The route also reinforced a lesson we've learned many times: when given the choice between the road and the trail, the trail is usually the better story. 

  

  

  

  

  

Flora

[Apiaceae] Astrantia major

  

[Asteraceae] Centaurea sp.

  

[Asteraceae] Cirsium sp.

[Asteraceae] Pilosella sp.

[Onagraceae] Epilobium sp.

[Orchidaceae] Dactylorhiza maculata

[Orchidaceae] Gymnadenia rhellicani or Nigritella rhellicani

[Plantaginaceae] Digitalis grandiflora

[Rosaceae] Sanguisorba dodecandra

 
 

Studying for the Italian Driving Test

Thirty Questions ~ Cultural Cues ~ Reading Carefully ~ Study Partner ~ 

Culture ~ Exam Day ~ Idoneo ~ More Than Driving

If you think about how to prepare for the Italian written driving exam, you might think to start by simply reading the manual. That's a good idea, but only up to a point.

I read the manual. More than once.

Looking back, however, I don't think the primary value of reading it was memorizing every rule. The value was building a mental map. Later, after I inevitably missed a question on a practice exam, I usually had a vague idea where to return in the book to understand what I'd gotten wrong.

The real preparation came elsewhere.

Thirty Questions at a Time

The final and practice exams consist of thirty true-or-false questions. Three mistakes or fewer and you pass. Four mistakes and you don't.

By the time I sat for the real exam, I had completed roughly 215 practice tests through the ACI (Automobile Club d’Italia) app. Toward the end, I was consistently finishing with one or two mistakes, just below the passing threshold.

At first, I wondered how many practice tests would be "enough." Fifty? One hundred?

After 150 tests, I began to suspect that the app was serving up different questions the more I used it. I can't prove this, but it certainly felt as though new questions continued to appear well after I thought I'd seen everything. Whether that was clever programming or simply a large question bank, the lesson is the same: don't stop practicing just because your average score starts looking good.

Practice tests don't simply measuring what you know. They expose you to what you don't know.

Note: I used the Automobile Club d’Italia (ACI) as the school to help me with paperwork and in theory to help me study, though I did all the studying on my own. ACI had in person and video lessons, so that was available. ACI was able to watch my process on the app and knew when I was ready.

Cultural Cues

I expected to spend months learning road signs, right-of-way rules, speed limits, and stopping distances. There are plenty of that. More questions than I care to remember involved trailers, towing weights, and which license category allows you to pull what combination of vehicle.

There were also many questions about railway crossings and passing. If the frequency of exam questions reflects national concerns, Italy appears to spend a surprising amount of time thinking about trains and passing, il sorpasso. Drilling on trains makes sense because many roads cross tracks. But the passing questions exhaust you. It’s as if they are trying to cover every possible little 'pass' an Italian driver has tried.

Another thing that surprised me was how much space the Italian driving manual gives to what happens after an accident. Not just the mechanics of stopping, putting out the warning triangle, or avoiding further danger, but the duty to help. In Italy this is not presented as a nice thing to do, or even only as a moral obligation. It is a legal obligation. Article 189 of the Codice della Strada says that a road user involved in an accident connected to their behavior must stop and provide the necessary assistance to anyone who may have suffered personal injury. Failure to stop after an accident involving injury can bring reclusione, the word that managed to stump me during the real exam, along with suspension of the driving license. 

This felt different from the way I remembered the subject being framed in the United States, where the emphasis, at least in my memory, was more on calling 911, not leaving the scene, and not making things worse unless you knew what you were doing. The U.S. is complicated because each state has its own rules. California, for example, does require a driver involved in an injury accident to stop, exchange information, and render “reasonable assistance” to injured people. But for ordinary bystanders, the California framing is less a general legal duty to intervene and more a Good Samaritan protection: if you voluntarily help in good faith and without compensation, you are generally protected from civil liability unless your conduct is grossly negligent or willful.

All of this about providing help as a bystander made me wonder if I'm up to the task.

Reading Every Word

Somewhere along my study path I realized I wasn't just learning traffic law. I was learning how to read Italian carefully.

I found that many of my mistakes weren't because I misunderstood the driving rule, rather the mistake happened because I skimmed. A single word could reverse the meaning of an entire sentence.

Words like sempre, soltanto, generalmente, può, or deve demanded attention. Miss one qualifier and suddenly a statement that looked perfectly reasonable became false. And watch out for the word “solo”!

Examples:

• Il giubbotto retroriflettente ad alta visibilità è utile solo quando si deve sostituire una ruota forata. [Falso]
• Il pannello integrativo raffigurato si trova solo se l'incidente è avvenuto in autostrada. [Falso]

Sometimes the challenge wasn't vocabulary but grammar. An adjective agreed with a noun I wasn't expecting. A pronoun referred to something earlier in the sentence.

A phrase like minor consumo, norme internazionali, or lungo quel tratto carried just enough nuance that reading quickly became dangerous.

Other times I encountered words I'd never seen before like dirigibilità and incolumità. These aren't exactly words that come up while ordering coffee.

Examples:

• Le frecce direzionali in figura sono a freccia combinata diritta-destra per corsie destinate a chi deve proseguire diritto o a destra. [Vero]
• Analysis: "le frecce" in general not specifically
• Nel caso in cui la sosta è espressamente vietata da una norma del codice della strada, l'osservanza di tale divieto è comunque condizionata dalla presenza di cartelli segnaletici. [Falso]
• Analysis: "condizionata" agrees with "osservanza" not "divieto"
• Tenere aperto il tettuccio scorrevole del veicolo comporta un minor consumo di carburante. [Falso]
• Analysis => "minor consumo" means "consuma meno", which not true!
• Gli stivali ad uso motociclistico sono omologati secondo norme internazionali. [Vero]
• Analysis => "norme internazionali" doesn't mean rigid international agreements but standards.
• Attraversare un passaggio a livello senza rispettare tutte le norme previste, può mettere in pericolo l'incolumità di molte persone che viaggino su un treno in transito. [Vero]
• Analysis => "incolumità" just means "safety".
• Le sospensioni non collaborano alla dirigibilità del veicolo, perché questa è assicurata unicamente dagli organi di direzione. [Falso]
• Analysis => "dirigibilità" means "La dirigibilità è la capacità di un veicolo, di un aeromobile o di un'imbarcazione di essere guidato e manovrato con precisione, seguendo una rotta stabilita."
• Il bordo del marciapiede dipinto come in figura indica che non si può sostare lungo quel tratto. [Vero]
• Analysis => "lungo + noun", not “a lungo”

So, in a small way, preparing for the exam gradually retrained the way I read Italian. Instead of looking for the general idea, I learned to slow down and pay attention to every word.

A Study Partner

After finishing practice tests, I often turned to AI. Not to answer the questions for me, but to explain why I had gotten one wrong. The distinction mattered.

Often the explanation wasn't about driving at all. It was about grammar, vocabulary, or understanding how Italian legal language is constructed. Sometimes I'd ask for the explanation in Italian. Sometimes I'd ask it to compare the Italian wording with English. Occasionally I'd ask it to invent similar examples until the rule finally clicked.

It became an unexpectedly useful tutor, especially for someone taking the exam in a second language.

It’s really easy to take a snapshot of the screen after the practice test is over and feed it into AI to ask why what you were thinking was wrong (or right in some cases).

A Small Window into Italian Culture

One unexpected pleasure was discovering what the exam writers considered worth asking. Some questions seemed delightfully specific.

Apparently, it is important to know that throwing a lit cigarette butt from the window is particularly dangerous if two-wheeled vehicles are approaching. (I wondered, what if the cigarette butt was extinguished first? Or, it was just another car?)

Another question asked whether a motorcycle rider may weave between stopped vehicles at a traffic light. It isn’t, but you see it all the time.

One question wanted to know whether two mopeds may ride side-by-side outside urban areas. Again, no, but hey, it saves space on the street, right?

And one memorable question suggested that elderly pedestrians should be encouraged across the road by flashing headlights and honking the horn. Thankfully, that statement was false.

Examples:

• Gettare mozziconi di sigaretta accesi dai finestrini è molto pericoloso soprattutto se sopraggiungono veicoli a due ruote. [Vero]
• Il conducente di un motociclo può fare lo slalom tra i veicoli al semaforo. [Falso]
• Fuori dai centri abitati, su una stessa corsia possono circolare affiancati due ciclomotori. [Falso]
• Quando le persone anziane attraversano la carreggiata bisogna lampeggiare e suonare il clacson per farle attraversare rapidamente. [Falso]

The questions occasionally felt like tiny snapshots of everyday Italian life. Whether they reflected reality or simply the collective imagination of the Ministry of Transport, they made studying more entertaining than I expected.

Reading the manual also helped explain some things I'd already noticed living in Italy. One entire section dealt with noise — when to use the horn, when not to, and why unnecessary noise matters. We wrote about this extensively in the Noise, According to the Italian Driving Manual.

Exam Day

The actual exam was almost anticlimactic. About halfway through the 20-minute exam, I encountered a word I couldn’t remember the meaning of: reclusione. I had in my head other license-related terms like revoca, revisione, ritirata, and sospensione, but not reclusione.

The meaning of the word finally came to me (“imprisonment”) and then it was a matter of trying to determine if the activity of the question – betting on illegal street races – could lead to imprisonment. For a moment I forgot I was taking a driving test and wondered whether I'd accidentally wandered into a law school exam. I guessed wrong, and that was one of the two questions I got wrong on the test.

Fortunately, one unfamiliar word and subject area (betting/racing) didn't derail the rest of the questions or the results.

On the day I went for the test at the motorizzazione (DMV), I was in a group of about 25-30 young people.  I was one of the last to finish. In the room adjacent to the testing room, the results appeared within a few minutes after everyone was finished. The results were on a single sheet of paper thrown on a desk. The eager test-takers flocked around to see if they passed.

Students gathering around to see results after the exam. 

Idoneo

Passed. That’s what idoneo means in this context: suitable, adequate. That's what you'll see next to your name right after the exam.

A little later I received a copy of my completed exam showing exactly which two questions I had missed. It was oddly satisfying after months of preparation to finally see the scorecard.

More Than a Driving Test

Preparing for the Italian written exam taught me the rules of the road. It also taught me something about learning a language.

The manual gave me a map. Hundreds of practice tests taught me where the difficult terrain was. Careful reading became more important than quick reading. AI helped explain the places where grammar and vocabulary got in the way.

And somewhere between trailer weights, railway crossings, and questions about cigarette butts, I became a more careful reader of Italian.

Escape to Isolatos: Notes on Curated Remoteness

There is a recognizable Italian vacation subculture: the summer Greek island escape whose value increases slightly when the island is less obvious, the route is more complicated, and the story requires a flowchart involving an airport, taxis, ferries, and perhaps a night in Piraeus. This post is about a contradiction that exists during that vacation. 

The desired vacation we are talking about here is presented as an escape from ordinary life. Yet it unfolds during the most synchronized moment of the Italian calendar, clustered around Ferragosto and the August shutdown. It is an escape performed almost collectively. Offices close, cities partially empty, and people disperse toward beaches, mountains, and islands on roughly the same timetable. 

Enjoying sunset on the island of Isolatos.

The recurring conversation

It begins like this: someone mentions where they’re going in August. The name is Greek, melodic, and not immediately placeable. People pull out their phones to see where the place is. The more remote or unknown, the better.

These conversations start in late spring and early summer. Inevitably, the details include the number of people in the village and the best tavernas in the chosen remote spot. To be clear: the fewer the better for both.

The central idea isn’t simply escapism but a curated remoteness: getting away, but in a culturally legible way that can be planned, narrated, and appreciated by others who understand the code. The logistical difficulty of the Greek vacation doesn’t undermine the escape. It authenticates it. This is a small fraction of Italians, but something we have noticed, likely tied to the socioeconomic circles we circulate in.

We confess to falling prey at times to this desire too. We want curated remoteness, but also authentic experience and connection to people and places — even if the connection is just with someone changing the sheets or serving us moussaka.

To further point the finger back at ourselves: we recently spent upwards of six hours planning a possible Greek-island getaway, all the while thinking about remoteness. (We won’t tell you which island...because we don’t want y’all to be there.)

A direct flight to a large island is useful. But a flight to Athens, a transfer to Piraeus, a ferry, and then perhaps another ferry to a smaller island can feel more like an achievement. You have not merely booked a beach holiday. You have discovered a place. The route becomes part of the story told before departure and again after returning.

There is also a mild form of distinction involved in all this. Mykonos is too obvious. Santorini is beautiful but compromised by the fact that everyone has heard of it. The ideal island is recognizable to the initiated but unfamiliar to at least some people around the dinner table. Its obscurity is a feature and the island name itself becomes a credential.

At dinner

As we were writing this, we went for dinner up the Bergamo walls. Every summer, temporary venues pop up on the old city walls serving simple dishes with great views. At dinner, the 50+ group lamented modern travel: Too much is known; there are too many images of what to expect and what to do. They waxed fondly of times with just paper maps and hope to see something.

This is the same group who often talks about what we have called curated remoteness. Maybe the search is a reaction to modern travel, a need to recreate what it used to be like.

Some numbers

Ferragosto is a public holiday on August 15. The long August shutdown is a strong workplace and social convention that varies by industry, employer, and family situation, but nonetheless is powerful in Italy. ISTAT data show August as the central month of Italian summer tourism: in the third quarter of 2025, 39.3 percent of tourist nights in Italy fell in August, more than in July or September, and domestic tourists accounted for 53.3 percent of August stays. Those figures concern tourism within Italy, not Italian departures for Greece, but they support the broader idea of a synchronized vacation calendar.

According to the Bank of Greece, Greece received about 40.7 million inbound travelers in 2024. Just over 2.0 million came from Italy, an increase of 10 percent over 2023. That puts Italians at roughly 5 percent of all inbound travelers. In that year, Italian visitors generated about €1.23 billion in receipts, or roughly 5.7 percent of Greece’s total tourism receipts. Italy trails larger markets such as Germany and the United Kingdom, but it is plainly one of Greece’s important source markets.

The Italian data tell a similar story from the other direction. Banca d’Italia counted about 1.6 million Italian trips to Greece in 2024. Greece ranked sixth among foreign destinations by Italian spending, after Spain, the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Italians spent about €1.37 billion there. Greece accounted for 2.6 percent of Italian outbound trips but 4.2 percent of outbound spending.

Greece is not merely an archipelago awaiting Italians in linen shirts looking for a slice of remoteness. Some visitors take package holidays to Rhodes, Crete, or Corfu. Some arrive on cruise ships and spend a few hours in Santorini or Mykonos. Some visit Athens, Thessaloniki, or the mainland. Some are Greeks returning to islands they have visited for years. The search for the slightly obscure island reached by a sequence of conveyances is real, but it belongs to a segment of travelers rather than everyone.

Italians are not the dominant visitors to Greece, but they are not a negligible group either.

Homegrown

We suspect the idea of curated remoteness is much larger than Italy. It applies to countries with a certain wealth and vacation mentality. But perhaps the desire is more accentuated here because Italy has so many beaches, islands, and summer spots. In 2017 post Abbronzatissima: Notes on the Allure of the Suntan in Italy, we wrote that Italy is surrounded by so much sea, it must compel Italians to seek it out ritualistically every summer, a ritual bordering on obligation.

But Italy’s homegrown abundance of sea and the crowded nature of the experience (Italians and people from elsewhere) make some Italians – our sample subculture – more targeted in their search for remoteness. And that search leads them to Greece. Greece has more islands and more coastline than Italy, especially in the "island-dense, fragmented coastline” sense that matters for the Greek-island vacation idea. Uncharted frontier and new cultivated remoteness.

To be fair, the Italian “system” is set up such that vacation time is highly prescribed: August. Maybe the forced synchronization leads some Italians to look farther afield so as not to end up on a beach with other Italians.

We, on the other hand, have the flexibility to take vacations in different parts of the year. Italians are often perplexed when we tell them we are staying put for July and August, enjoying our adopted city, and not the sea or the mountains. We’ll take a vacation in the fall.

In the 2024 post Why do we travel?, we mused about why we travel at all. In our case, over the years the "why" has changed. Perhaps the observations in this post are just a passing phase for the group of friends we hang with.

Or maybe we are overthinking this: all this analysis is for naught and an Italian taking a vacation on a remote Greek island simply wants to get away from it all, Italy and their co-nationals. And that’s all.  

Happy summer vacation!  

Sesto Hiking Flower Photos

In this post we show flowers seen during late June hikes around Sesto/Sexten. See the post One Week of Hiking in Sesto (Sexten), South Tyrol - Five Hikes.

Composite of 36 flower photos from hikes near Sesto.

Late June is a good time for flowers in South Tyrol, though what you see depends heavily on elevation, exposure, and how recently winter has given up. As usual, we did not go off trail to photograph plants. Many flowers are easily visible from the path, and meadows do not need hikers wandering through them just because someone has suddenly become interested in botany.

We are including just 36 that we were able to spot. Think of this as the likely candidates you'll come across. We used Checklist Flora per Regione for Trentino Alto-Adige to help guide our identifications.

[Family] Genus species

[Asteraceae] Cicerbita alpina
[Asteraceae] Cirsium erisithales
[Asteraceae] Cirsium spinosissimum
[Asteraceae] Crepis aurea
[Brassicaceae] Biscutella laevigata
[Campanulaceae] Campanula barbata
[Campanulaceae] Phyteuma orbiculare
[Campanulaceae] Phyteuma ovatum
[Caryophyllaceae] Minuarti recurva
[Caryophyllaceae] Silene dioicia
[Ericaceae] Rhododendron hirsutum
[Ericaceae] Rhodothamnus chamaecistus
[Fabaceae] Anthyllis vulneraria
[Fabaceae] Onobrychis viciifolia
[Fabaceae] Trifolium alpinum
[Gentianaceae] Gentiana acaulis
[Gentianaceae] Gentiana sp.
[Lamiaceae] Lamium album
[Lamiaceae] Thymus sp.
[Lentibulariaceae] Pinguicula alpina
[Liliaceae] Lilium martagon
[Orchidaceae] Gymnadenia sp.
[Orobanchaceae] Bartsia alpina
[Orobanchaceae] Pedicularis verticillata
[Papaveraceae] Papaver alpinum
[Plantaginaceae] Linaria alpina
[Ranunculaceae] Aconitum lycoctonum
[Ranunculaceae] Aquilegia atrata
[Ranunculaceae] Clematis alpina (now Atragene alpina)
[Ranunculaceae] Ranunculus glacialis
[Ranunculaceae] Trollius europaeus
[Rosaceae] Dryas octapetala
[Rosaceae] Geum reptans
[Rosaceae] Rosa sp.
[Saxifragaceae] Saxifraga exarata
[Saxifragaceae] Saxifraga sp.