A Hike from Rifugio Ca’ San Marco to Lago di Pescegallo

Overview ~ Notes ~ Hike to Eat ~ Casa Cantoniera and Linea Cadorna ~ 

Cultural Literacy, Italian Style ~ Photos

  

  

Top left: View from Passo di Verrobbio looking north toward Valtellina and Switzerland
Top center: Lago di Pescegallo, Valgerola Italy.

Top right: Tracks from Rifugio Ca' San Marco to Lago di Pescegallo.

Bottom left: Small lake near Passo di Verobbio.

Bottom center: View south over Lago Valmora, near Rifugio Ca' San Marco.

Bottom right: Heading toward Ca' San Marco.


Sometimes the best hikes are the ones that materialize the day before. A friend asked us on Saturday if we wanted to go hiking the next day with a group of friends. Of course we did.

Overview

Duration: 2 hours (walking time)
Elevation: 445 m
Length: 7.8 km
Location: Italy, Bergamo, Alta Valle Brembana

Notes

We got a late start on Sunday due to large group logistics but managed to arrive Rifugio Ca’ San Marco still the respectable morning hour of 10:30 am, where the morning coolness was still perceptible.

Our destination was Lago di Pescegallo and CAI Sentiero 161, which runs from the rifugio toward Lago di Pescegallo and eventually Passo di Salmurano. With the size of the group, the late start, and unspoken “let’s have ourselves a little Sunday walk but let’s not miss lunch” hanging in the air, we knew this was not going to be an epic hiking day.

From Rifugio Ca’ San Marco, at about 1,830 meters, we headed toward Passo di Verrobbio at 2,026 meters. Once over the pass, the trail enters Val di Bomino and Valtellina. The scenery improved considerably around the pass, where there are remnants of World War I trenches (Linea Cadorna).

Our original destination was Lago di Pescegallo, but lunch exerted a stronger gravitational pull. There wasn’t enough time to descend to the lake and climb back before our reservation, so we turned around above it. Our outing came to 7.8 km with about 445 meters of elevation gain. The lake will have to wait for another day.

Hike to Eat

Back at Rifugio Ca’ San Marco, we arrived just as everyone was ordering lunch. We were with a very hungry group, and we dawdled on the way back to the rifugio, our attention caught by a small snake and a family from Lazio. The snake was likely a biscia or grass snake.

We went appropriately Valtellinese with pizzoccheri della Valtellina and penne con ragù di lepre. We finished by sharing strüdel, and then someone passed around some very good young goat robiola bought from a vendor who set up shop in the rifugio’s parking lot.

The pizzoccheri were particularly appropriate because we had just walked over the ridge into Valtellina. And so was our wine: a Triacca Valtellina Superiore Inferno 2021, made with Nebbiolo. We were drinking wine from the valley we could see off to the north.

But the gastronomic story didn't end with lunch.

As mentioned, in the parking area outside Ca’ San Marco was a cheese and salumi vendor. This made our day. We left with Bitto, fresh cow's-milk robiola, grasso d’alpe, bresaola, rye bread, dried blueberries, and bisciola – the Valtellinese sweet bread with figs, walnuts, and raisins. The vendor told us that his Bitto came from the milk of cows grazing below the rifugio, probably from the same malga we had looked down on while hiking.

Bitto has a fascinating connection to these valleys. Its origins are traditionally traced back to the Celts who took refuge in Valtellina and, as skilled herders and cheesemakers, developed long-lasting cheeses as a way of preserving the nutritional value of milk. Today's Bitto is a full-fat, semi-hard cheese made from raw whole cow milk, with a small amount of goat milk optionally added. The complicated modern history of cheese also produced "Storico Ribelle," the name adopted by producers who wanted to preserve the older production traditions.

So, one afternoon we had quite the Valtellina lineup: pizzoccheri, Nebbiolo wine from Valtellina, bitto cheese, bresaola (cured meat), bisciola (sweet bread), and gorgeous scenery.

Casa Cantoniera and Linea Cadorna

Today Ca’ San Marco may just seem like another rifugio, but there is more to it.

Ca’ San Marco’s role must be placed inside the geopolitical logic of the Via Priula, a historic communication route and an alpine hiking route that connects Bergamo to Morbegno, passing through the San Marco Pass.

Ca’ San Marco was built in 1593 at the edge of the Venetian mainland territories, it functioned as a casa cantoniera (point of monitoring traffic, goods, and movement) on an international frontier: a staffed outpost at the very crest of the Passo San Marco, where the Republic of Venice met the territories of the Grigioni (Three Leagues). The formal customs house — the actual dogana — sat lower down at Mezzoldo, where goods and travelers were inspected before beginning the climb. Ca’ San Marco, by contrast, was the high‑altitude presence of Venetian authority: a shelter, a control point, and a symbolic marker of the border. In early‑modern Alpine practice, this was typical — customs in the last village, state outpost on the pass itself — and Ca’ San Marco fit that pattern precisely.

Today the pass separates two Lombard valleys: Val Brembana (Province of Bergamo) on the southern side and Valtellina (Province of Sondrio) on the northern side. Administratively it is no longer a state frontier, but geographically it remains a watershed divide between the Brembo and the Adda, and culturally it still marks the transition between two distinct alpine regions with different historical trajectories. Before the unification of Italy, however, this ridge was a true international boundary: Venice to the south, the Grigioni to the north, and beyond them the routes toward Chur, the Rhine, and northern Europe. The Via Priula was built precisely to exploit this crossing, allowing Venetian merchants to bypass Spanish‑controlled Milan and maintain direct access to transalpine trade.

The Orobie form a steep, folded, high‑relief chain that historically acted as a natural barrier: militarily defensible, commercially constraining, and climatically severe. Only a handful of routes could be made viable, and Passo San Marco was one of the few that could be kept open and controlled. Snow, fog, and avalanches made the crossing dangerous; Ca’ San Marco’s bell was used to guide travelers in storms. In this sense, the building’s function was inseparable from the landscape: the mountains created the obstacle, the pass created the opportunity, and Ca’ San Marco was the human instrument that made the frontier navigable and governable.

Nearby and many centuries later, we can see remains of World War I activity. At the Verrobbio pass, which we passed through to go to Lago di Pescegallo, the remains of the trenches built before the outbreak of the First World War by the Italian Army are still present. In anticipation of a possible breakthrough of the Tonale front and a consequent descent of the Austrians along the Valtellina, Italy build these defenses. They are part of the Cadorna Line. Fortunately, these defensive constructions were never used.

The official name of the Cadorna Line is the Northern Frontier. Cadorna comes from the surname of Luigi Cadorna (1850 – 1928), Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, who ordered them built. This defensive system is 70 km long, stretching from the Varese area to the Aprica pass in Val Camonica, and served as a second line of defense in case the main front, at Stelvio and Tonale, collapsed or in case of attack by the Austrians through neutral Switzerland. Fortunately, the Cadorna Line was never used.

Cultural Literacy, Italian Style

Our education continued in the car on the way home.

First came an important Bergamasco proverb: La bóca l’è mai straca se la sa mia de àca – roughly, the mouth is never tired if it hasn't tasted of cow, or, more practically, a meal isn't really finished until you've had some cheese.

Given the amount of cheese we'd just bought, we were apparently taking the proverb seriously.

Then somehow, we arrived at the seven deadly sins and a discussion of ignavia – sloth, indolence, or the unwillingness to take a stand.

And then came 15 minutes discussing the movie Amici miei ("My Friends" in English.)

According to our Italian friends, Amici miei, Mario Monicelli's 1975 comedy, is basically required reading – or viewing – for understanding Italian culture. The film follows a group of middle-aged Florentine men who escape everyday life through their zingarate: elaborate, spontaneous, and often ridiculous pranks. This is one of those films we've heard referenced enough that not knowing it starts to feel like a gap in our Italian cultural education.

It wasn't the longest hike we've done, and technically we didn't make it all the way down to Lago di Pescegallo. But we crossed from Bergamo into Valtellina, walked past old military trenches, ate pizzoccheri, drank Valtellina wine, bought cheese with roots stretching back to the Celts, and returned home with a lot more.

Not bad for a Sunday.

Photos

  

Rifugio Ca' San Marco in Alta Valle Brembana, Bergamo, Italy.

  

Left: Menu at Rifugio Ca' San Marco.

Center: The lion of San Marco / Venice affixed on the side of Rifugio Ca' San Marco.

Right: A wine from the nearby Valtellina, a Nebbiolo.

  

Left: Rifugio Ca' San Marco - pizzoccheri - a typical food from the nearby Valtellina valley.

Center: Rifugio Ca' San Marco - penne con ragù di lepre.

Right: Rifugio Ca' San Marco strudel.

  

Left: Bitto cheese on polenta crust.

Center: Our cheese and meat haul.

Right: Local vendor's sign at the rifugio, selling cheeses and other products from the nearby valleys.

  

Left and center: Part of the Linea Cadorna at Passo di Verrobbio. 

Right: A cow grazes near Rifugio Ca' San Marco.

The Loops of August

Coding Loop ~ Vacation Loop ~ AI Loop ~ Duke Loop ~ Loops Within Loops

The Loops of August: Coding, AI, YouTube Algorithms, Vacations

August is strange in Italy. Shutters come down, regular routines disappear, people vanish, and then toward the end of the month everyone materializes again, tanned, rested or claiming to be, and faintly optimistic about September.

We mostly sat out this August. While other people were heading for beaches, islands, mountains, and increasingly complicated travel connections, we stayed home and worked on projects. There was coding to do. There were long conversations with AI assistants. And, for reasons that will become clear, there were an alarming number of dukes.

The disappearing and reappearing of Italy is the obvious one, an annual cycle so regular that you can practically set a calendar by the appearance of handwritten Chiuso per ferie signs. But once we started looking, other loops appeared around us: bursts of obsessive coding followed by months of silence; conversations with AI assistants that circle the same problem without quite landing on it; and a YouTube algorithm that has decided we have an inexhaustible appetite for overlooked stepdaughters marrying scarred members of the British aristocracy.

These are not really the same kind of loop. Some loops we create ourselves. Some loops society creates for us. Some loops we get stuck in. And some, apparently, come with a ducal seal.

The Coding Loop: Three Weeks On, Three Months Off

The evidence is sitting in our GitHub contribution charts.

We used to imagine that we worked on our Scrapbook project continuously, but slowly realized we actually didn’t, and the little green squares of the contribution chart tell that story. There will be three or four weeks of dense activity, commits stacked on commits, followed by long stretches of almost nothing. Green squares appear in a row showing activity. Then white, the digital equivalent of abandonment.

GitHub contributions going in cycles.

Scrapbook is not a toy app we occasionally tinker with. It is a long-running project built and maintained by the two of us, with roughly 80,000 lines of code, about 25,000 of them executable. It lives in the cloud, uses a range of technologies, gets fixed, acquires new features, and often just needs attention because something it depends on has changed. We have been working on it for years and, importantly, we don't want to finish it.

There is language for the pattern visible in our GitHub charts. Researchers studying human activity call one aspect of it burstiness: concentrated periods of activity separated by long periods of relative quiet. Our weeks inside those bursts can also feel a lot like hyperfocus, the state of becoming so absorbed in an activity that time and everything around it recedes.

And coding is particularly good at keeping a burst going. One fix suggests another. The new feature almost works. Then it works. Now that it works, we can finally clean up the thing beside it that has annoyed us for two years. While we are in the code, we notice something else. At some point it is midnight, and a perfectly reasonable Saturday has disappeared into a C# and JavaScript methods that should have taken twenty minutes.

Then, just as mysteriously, coding stops.

For months we might barely touch the code. Our Scrapbook project continues to run. Other interests take over. The green squares disappear.

A few years ago, we noticed this pattern and wondered whether it was something we should worry about. Now we are less sure. This is coding for pleasure. There is no product manager waiting for a sprint review, and no investor is asking about features. Perhaps the periods of inactivity are part of what makes the periods of intensity possible.

The coding loop may be one of the loops we don't need to escape. We just disappear from it for a while, until something pulls us back in again.

The August Loop: Everybody Leaves, Everybody Comes Back

Our little two-person coding cycle takes place inside a much larger and considerably more organized loop: August in Italy.

Starting in late July, the country begins its progressive emptying-out. Shop windows display hand scrawled Chiuso per ferie messages. Offices become harder to reach. Automated out of office messages in email start to become the norm. Conversations increasingly revolve around when you are leaving, where you are going, and when you are coming back. Then comes Ferragosto, August 15, the symbolic center of a summer vacation season treated with a seriousness we still find impressive after living here for years.

We have written about this before: Bergamo – Street Sign Language Lesson X – Ferragosto!, Abbronzatissima: Notes on the Allure of the Suntan in Italy, and most recently Escape to Isolatos: Notes on Curated Remoteness. In the last post, we were interested in the slightly paradoxical Italian search for escape: everybody getting away from it all at approximately the same time.

But escape is only half the loop.

Toward the end of August, people begin appearing again. The shutters go up. Familiar faces return, various shades darker. There are stories about beaches and mountains and islands, mixed with complaints about traffic, ferries, delayed flights, excessive heat, and all the other inconveniences encountered while getting away to relax.

Then comes that brief September feeling that everything is beginning again. Schools reopen. Offices refill. Out of office messages just become the normal delayed responses. Plans are made. People seem faintly renewed. For a few weeks, September has the same quality of January without New Year’s resolutions.

The return completes the loop. Unlike our coding bursts, this one is based on the calendar and is collective. Everyone knows roughly when it is going to happen and participates willingly.

There is something slightly funny about the annual acceptance of it all. Italy empties out in August, businesses close because everyone is away, people complain that nothing is open and nothing can get done because everyone is away, and then the whole system starts up again. Next summer, we will do it all over.  

The AI Loop: Down the Rabbit Hole

During the hotter days of August, we spent quite a bit of time indoors with air conditioning and AI assistants, sometimes while coding and sometimes asking about whatever question had wandered into our heads that day.

This introduced another kind of loop.

The transaction often starts innocently enough. Take a coding task. We ask an assistant to solve something. It misunderstands one small but important part of the problem. We correct it. The assistant apologizes, usually enthusiastically: "You’re absolutely right!" It then produces another answer based on substantially the same misunderstanding. We correct it again.

Twenty minutes later, we are no longer solving the original problem. We are trying to make the assistant understand the conversation we have already had. We see our AI credits are going to zero, and we bump our spending budgets because the problem needs to be solved.

Part of what keeps us stuck is sunk cost. We have already supplied the background, pasted the code, explained what we tried, and corrected assumptions. Surely one more prompt will do it. Meanwhile, the conversation itself is getting longer, accumulating failed approaches and explanations that may now be part of the problem. We find ourselves not so politely telling the assistant that we are burning our credits while going around in circles. Response: empathetic with yet another attempt at a fix.

The problem is that AI answers are often very plausible. A wrong answer doesn't necessarily (immediately) look wrong. It can arrive neatly formatted, confidently explained, perhaps with five helpful headings. This makes it surprisingly easy to follow an assistant a considerable distance down the wrong road before realizing that neither of you remembers where you intended to go.

We used to jokingly call some of this being "gaslit by AI," but that isn't really what is happening. The assistant isn't trying to convince us of an alternate reality. More often, we and it have diverged on what problem is being solved. It thinks we asked one thing; we thought we asked another. Sometimes the fault is ours because we were imprecise, withheld context we didn't realize mattered, or assumed the assistant understood something that existed only in our heads.

We are slowly getting better at recognizing the warning signs.

Sometimes the answer is to narrow the question. Sometimes it is to start a fresh conversation rather than keep dragging the accumulated baggage forward. And sometimes the best solution is simply to leave one AI assistant and ask another.

That last technique has become surprisingly useful. Instead of asking the second assistant to solve the whole problem again, we can show it what happened and ask questions: Were we talking past each other? What is the first assistant misunderstanding? Here’s a plan to fix a coding issue the first assistant gave us. What do you think of it?

We have, in other words, begun taking one AI assistant aside to complain about another AI assistant. It sounds faintly absurd translated into ordinary life, but it works. Different assistants approach the same question differently, notice different assumptions, and get stuck in different places. Increasingly, knowing how to use AI assistants means knowing not only what to ask, but when to stop asking the same one.

The AI loop is therefore unlike our coding loop. Coding can pull us forward because every solved problem exposes another interesting one. The AI loop at times can keep us in place because every attempted solution seems as though it might finally resolve the previous attempted solution but doesn’t.

The trick is noticing when supposed progress has turned into circling.

The Duke Loop: Algorithmic Pulp Fiction

Meanwhile, YouTube has discovered that apparently what I need in August is an overlooked stepdaughter, a cruel stepmother, letters sealed with wax, a mysterious duke with a scar who perhaps recently returned from fighting somewhere on the Continent.

I fell into a genre of long-form historical romance stories, many clearly produced with some combination of AI—generated writing, narration, and images. They tend to be set in an elastic version of 19th-century England, somewhere between the Regency and Victorian periods. If our duke has recently returned from war, it may be the Napoleonic Wars in earlier stories or the Crimean War in the later ones. Historical precision is not necessarily the main attraction, just that vague historical events produce our broken duke.

What has been surprising is how quickly I have acquired the vocabulary of this faux-19th-century universe: reticule, ducal seal, signet ring, dowry, marriage contract, estate ledger, bombazine (fabric), duke vs. earl, and the ton, the fashionable upper reaches of British society. There are carriages, beeswax candles, the smell of wool and wet horse, neglected estates, double entries in ledgers, invisible stepdaughters, nasty stepmothers, well-tailored jackets of broadcloth, shy heroines hiding behind potted palms at the ball, marriages of convenience, and an astonishing number of men who speak in a "low scrape."

I didn't set out to learn any of this. The vocabulary arrived through repetition, one little algorithmically encouraged click at a time.

What I'm listening to is a kind of algorithmic pulp fiction. The technology may be new, but the machinery of the story is old. A wronged, overlooked woman is humiliated. Someone powerful finally sees what everyone else has failed to see. The nasty relatives are exposed. Fraud is revealed. Goodness is rewarded. And the duke eventually understands what the viewer (and most often just a listener) understood forty-five minutes earlier at the start of the story.

Then the story ends happily, and I click on another one.

That is the loop. YouTube learns that I will watch a story about an ignored stepdaughter and offers me another ignored stepdaughter. Perhaps this time with two cruel stepsisters and a kindly but very broke father. I click again, which presumably confirms that what I really need is a third ignored stepdaughter. Somewhere along the way the duke acquires a more prominent scar from temple to jawbone, just to add interest.

Why can't I stop listening?

Partly, I think, because good winning out has a universal appeal and perhaps even more so at this moment and time in my life. These 45- to 90-minute stories are auditory comfort food. We know roughly where they are going, and knowing is part of the pleasure. The attraction isn't suspense so much as promised emotional payback. However badly things go for the heroine in the first forty minutes, the ducal seal is waiting somewhere in the final twenty.

This makes the Duke Loop almost the inverse of the AI assistant loop. In the AI loop, repetition postpones resolution: one more exchange might finally get us out. In the Duke Loop, repetition guarantees resolution. The same machine starts up again, and that is precisely what we came for.

Loops Within Loops

By the end of August, our four loops were beginning to look less alike.

The vacation loop is a ritual. It repeats because repetition (in Italy) gives shape to the year: leave, disappear, return, begin again.

The coding loop is a cycle of enthusiasm. Pleasure and curiosity arrive in clumps, followed by stretches when our attention goes somewhere else. Nothing is particularly wrong with that.

The AI assistant loop is different. It is a trap. We stay in it because every next exchange looks as though it might finally resolve the previous one. Plus, the technology is still new, and we are all still learning how to use it efficiently.

And the Duke Loop is a reward machine. It keeps turning because it reliably gives us what we came for: recognition, justice, a happy ending, and apparently another estate ledger.

So perhaps the useful distinction isn't that loops are bad or good. Life contains plenty of repetition, and August itself is proof that repetition is not necessarily something to escape. Rituals, hobbies, seasons, stories, and habits all depend upon coming around again.

The more interesting question is how much control we have over the circle. In some loops, we are in the driver's seat. In others, we are passengers. Sometimes society has set the route long before we arrived as with vacations in Italy. And occasionally an algorithm is quietly deciding where the next turn will be as with our YouTube consumption.

That gives us a rough rule for these particular August loops. The coding loop doesn't need to be fixed. The vacation loop couldn't be fixed even if we wanted to; acceptance is better. The AI loop needs a circuit breaker. The Duke Loop...well, perhaps one more story, just until we find out whether poor quiet Eleanor (and they are always named Eleanor) wins over the scarred duke. (Spoiler: she does.)

There is one final loop hiding inside this post. We wrote about AI loops using research produced through conversations with AI assistants, including research about AI-generated romance stories being fed to us by another algorithm. At some point the snake begins eating its own tail. Is the future a form of funhouse recursion. Loops within loops?

And then, while writing the paragraph above, I remembered that I wrote a song called Endless Loop, about getting stuck inside expectations and repeating patterns around us. How easily I forget.

Apparently even our observations about loops come in loops.

Capù at the End of the Trail – Lago Branchino

Overview ~ Notes ~ Geology ~ Flora ~ Photos

  

Left: View north toward Passo dei Laghi Gemelli.
Center: Hike route from Valcanale to Lago Branchino and back.
Right: Food - Capù con polenta at Rifugio Alpe Corte.

The Third Time’s a charm? Maybe.

We generally don’t repeat hikes, except for destinations very close that we start out on foot from the house like Canto Alto, Canto Basso, Maresana, or Misma. So, it is interesting that we’ve been to Lago Branchino three times over 10 or so years. We generally want the next valley, the next rifugio, the unexplored trail. But today, we were invited to participate, and when a free and easy ride to the mountain arrives at the doorstep, you get in and don’t make too much of a fuss even if it’s been a hike, you’ve already done.

Overview

Duration: 4.5 hours with stops for snacks and lunch (3 hours walking)
Elevation: 736 m
Length: 10.8 km
Location: Val Seriana – Valcanale

Parking for this hike is typically in one or two big lots at the end of the Valcanale when you can’t go any more like here and here. The higher lots (or maybe all) require a ticket that you can buy at a bar/cafe on your way in or at a ticket machine.

From the parking lots, just follow the well marked trails. You’ll be following bits of Sentiero 218A: Giro dell'Alpe Neel, Sentiero 218: Rifugio Alpe Corte - Baita GAN, and at the start Sentiero 220: Ardesio - Valcanale - Rifugio Alpe Corte.

Notes

We have a “three nights minimum in a city” rule when traveling for more than a few days. Why don’t we have a “three visit rule” for hikes? Maybe we should start thinking about that: three hikes are how a trail starts becoming a place rather than an itinerary. And as you will see, we learned a little more about Lago Branchino and ate something interesting!

In fact, during this hike we had a small sense of becoming local through repetition. Times we've passed this way:

• Hike in Valcanale: Rifugio Branchino and Lago Branchino - early July
• An Early Spring Hike to Lago Branchino in Valcanale (Ardesio), in the Upper Val Seriana - early April
• Seven Days on the Sentiero delle Orobie – A Journey Through the Bergamo Alps - mid July

And we sort of lied; this would be our fourth time passing by Rifugio Alpe Corte (lower part of the hike). We forgot we did it on our Sentiero delle Orobie trek. How easily do we forget.

On the other hand, some things are hard to forget, like where to stop for coffee on our way up Val Seriana whereas our companions (Bergamaschi) forgot. That place is Minuscoli, where we always stop on our way to hike or ski in Val Seriana. We’ve stopped so many times with different friends; it’s a habit.

Parking for this hike is typically in one or two big lots at the end of the Valcanale when you can’t go any more like here and here. The higher lots (or maybe all) require a ticket that you can buy at a bar/cafe on your way in or at a ticket machine.

From the parking lots, just follow the well marked trails. You’ll be following bits of Sentiero 218A: Giro dell'Alpe Neel, Sentiero 218: Rifugio Alpe Corte - Baita GAN, and at the start Sentiero 220: Ardesio - Valcanale - Rifugio Alpe Corte.

After parking, we headed straight for the Lago Branchino (1,784 m) bypassing the always busy Rifugio Alpe Corte, which we would return to later. Just before the lake, we stopped at Rifugio Branchino (1,787 m) for coffee and cake. After coffee and cake we went up the pass just beyond and above the lake. A mass was in progress, people spread out on the hillside listening to the sermon.

We left before the amen and headed back down to Rifugio Alpe Corte (1,410 m) for lunch. It’s there that we saw on the menu and much to our surprise capù con polenta. (Love culinary surprises!)

A friend’s aunt once made something similar, but she called it nosècc, another name for it. But this was the first time we ever saw it in a rifugio. (See, this is why we want new rifugio for every hike.... our stomachs demand it.)

Capù con polenta is a dish that belongs to the Bergamo valleys through and through. Capù are cabbage rolls traditionally filled with breadcrumbs, local cheese, egg, garlic and parsley; later versions often include pork or sausage. The historic Parre/Val Seriana version is di magro, without meat. The name means “capon” in dialect, and your lunch note includes the lovely folklore about poor mountain families making a cabbage-leaf “capon” for a child who couldn't have the real bird.

Geology

While we have visited this small lake before, we didn’t truly appreciate the geology of this area until we wrote this post.

Lago Branchino is a small, alpine karst lake located at an altitude of approximately 1,784 meters within the Orobie Bergamasche Regional Park in Lombardy, Italy. But what does that mean? A karst lake is a geological formation dictated by karstification. Thanks, but still not helpful. Karstification occurs when soluble bedrock is dissolved by water. Karst lakes are formed as the result of a collapse of caves, especially in water-soluble rocks such as limestone, gypsum and dolomite.

Intriguing, tell me more.

The vast majority of alpine lakes in the Orobian range are formed by glacial excavation carving out impermeable granite or slate basins, Lago Branchino is an exception because:

• Soluble Limestone Bedrock: The lake sits in a high-altitude basin surrounded by the limestone and dolomite peaks of Corno Branchino and Corna Piana. Over millennia, acidic rainwater and melting snow slowly dissolved the calcium carbonate in the rock. This chemical weathering ate away at the mountain surface, opening up cracks, fissures, and ultimately collapsing underground voids to form a natural depression known as a doline or sinkhole.
• The Sealed "Lakebed" Effect: Usually, water in a limestone landscape immediately drains straight down through the porous rock into subterranean cave networks. Lago Branchino holds water because its shallow bed is layered with a thick buildup of insoluble clay, silt, and organic sediment. This residual material has acted as a natural waterproof plug, blocking the underlying rock fractures and allowing water to collect pool-style in the basin rather than draining into the mountain.
• Exclusively Rain and Snow-Fed: True to karst lake behavior, Lago Branchino has no surface inlets (streams or rivers) flowing into it. It is entirely fed by precipitation, surface runoff, and subterranean snowmelt. Because it lacks a steady surface river supply, the lake water level can fluctuate significantly depending on the season and dry spells.

Nearby the lake are the limestone peaks of Corno Branchino and Corna Piana. 

Lago Branchino serves as a central hub for hikers traversing the Bergamasque Alps. Right next to its western shore sits the seasonal mountain hut, Rifugio Lago Branchino. Someday, we going to do the Sentiero dei fiori, which passes through the pass (where the mass was being held).

Flora

The end of August was not the best time for flower spotting. We managed to get just a few.

[Asteraceae] Carlina acaulis
 

[Asteraceae] Centaurea sp.


[Asteraceae] Solidago sp. with hoverfly
 

[Gentianaceae] Gentiana asclepiadea
 

[Ranunculaceae] Aconitum napellus
 

Photos

  

Left and center: Mass at Passo del Branchino (1,821 m).

Right: One of the flock has escaped. Bergamasca - pecora gigante.

 

Left: Baita Bassa Alpe Neel above Valcanale.

Right: Sign showing biodiversity of the area - all the flowers and butterflies we didn't see today!

  

Left: Capù con polenta at Rifugio Alpe Corte.
Center: Penne con crema di porcini, tartufo and taleggio at Rifugio Alpe Corte.

Right: Rifugio Alpe Corte coffee and cake.

 

Left: Coffee and cake at Rifugio Branchino.

Right: Rifugio Alpe Corte menu.

  

Left: Above Valcanale, looking east over Alpe Neel.

Center: Pasture above Valcanale with view toward Passo dei Laghi Gemelli.

Right: View from pastures looking east with Monte Secco on the right.

Street Sign Language Lesson LVII

previous lesson | this lesson

In this round of Street Sign Language Lesson, we find Bud Spencer in the canned-bean aisle, learn the job description of an alpine sheepdog, get warned about a sobbalzo while walking in Bergamo, and encounter an organo in movimento in Milan. We also get watched by many eyes in Genoa, wait for medicine at Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital, and read two lost-pet notices.

As usual, the signs start out as language lessons and wander off into film, shepherding, road paving, machinery, public transportation, hospital logistics, and dogs that look sort of like Beagles.  Let's begin.

Fagioli alla Bud Spencer. Ricetta originale.
"Bud Spencer-style beans. Original recipe."

The grammar isn't the interesting part here. Alla Bud Spencer simply means roughly "Bud Spencer style." The more interesting question for an English-speaking visitor looking at a can of beans in Carrefour might be: Who is Bud Spencer?

Bud Spencer was the screen name of Carlo Pedersoli, an Italian swimmer who represented Italy at the 1952 and 1956 Olympics before becoming an actor. In 1967, when he was asked to adopt an American-sounding name for an Italian western, he combined Budweiser, his favorite beer, with the surname of actor Spencer Tracy. His co-star Mario Girotti similarly became Terence Hill, and Bud Spencer and Terence Hill went on to become a hugely successful screen duo, especially in comic westerns and action films.

And the beans aren't random. Beans cooked in a pan became strongly associated with the Bud Spencer-Terence Hill films, particularly the Trinità movies, enough that Italian food writing has referred to an entire comic "fagioli-western" tradition.

So, there is quite a lot packed into a €3.35 can sitting between the mushrooms and lentils. The label assumes you already know the joke.

Il cane da raduno raduna e sposta il bestiame seguendo le indicazioni dell'allevatore.
"The herding dog gathers and moves the livestock, following the farmer's instructions."

We liked this sentence because of the repetition: il cane da raduno raduna...

The noun raduno comes from radunare, meaning to gather or bring together. We usually encounter raduno referring to a gathering of people: un raduno degli Alpini, un raduno automobilistico, a rally, meet, or gathering.

Here, though, cane da raduno is literally a "gathering dog," what we would normally call a herding dog in English. Then comes raduna, the third-person singular of radunare: the gathering dog gathers. The Pasturs sign itself contrasts this job with that of il cane da protezione, whose task is to defend livestock against predators and other threats.

Then we get sposta, from spostare, "to move," and seguendo, "following": raduna e sposta il bestiame seguendo le indicazioni dell'allevatore = gathers and moves the livestock according to the farmer's instructions.

The distinction between the dogs took on a little more meaning after our recent long hike up the Vò Valley to Rifugio Tagliaferri, where we came across a herd of roughly 1,000 Pecora Gigante Bergamasca and spoke with the shepherd tending them. With that many sheep, radunare e spostare stops sounding like a vocabulary exercise and starts sounding like quite a job description.

Attenzione, sobbalzo di corsia.
A natural translation here would be something like “Caution: uneven lane surface” or “Caution: sudden change in lane level”.

We saw these signs while walking in Città Alta as a road was being resurfaced. Sobbalzo was new to us.

The noun sobbalzo comes from the verb sobbalzare. Treccani defines sobbalzare as making small repeated jumps or jolts, particularly when talking about a vehicle traveling over an uneven road. With a person, it can also mean to jump or start suddenly from surprise or fear. Sobbalzo is the resulting jolt or sudden movement.

So:

• La macchina sobbalza sulla strada sconnessa.
  The car jolts along the uneven road.
• Ho sobbalzato quando ho sentito il rumore.
  I jumped when I heard the noise.

What we like about sobbalzo is that it doesn't really name the physical bump or unevenness in the road. It names the jolt or sudden vertical movement produced by it. A car can sobbalzare when it hits an uneven patch of pavement, and that movement is un sobbalzo. So attenzione sobbalzo di corsia is effectively warning that the difference in road level may make your vehicle jump or jolt.  

 

Organo in movimento.

Moving part / moving machinery.

We saw these two signs in Milan. Our first reaction was to organo in movimento, which translated word for word gives us organ in motion. This sounds considerably more medical than mechanical.

But organo has a technical meaning in Italian. In machinery, an organo can be a component or functional part of a machine. Italian safety literature routinely uses expressions such as organi in movimento, organi ruotanti, and organi di trasmissione for moving, rotating, and transmission components.

The other question we had was whether in movimento means that the thing is moving right now, or that it could move.

Grammatically, it simply means "in motion." There is no "might" or future sense built into the phrase. But as a safety warning, organo in movimento is better understood as a category of hazard: moving part. The component does not have to be moving at the instant you read the sign, any more than an English "Caution: Moving Parts" label becomes false when a machine is switched off. The warning is that this thing moves when the system operates, so don't assume it will remain where it is

That is particularly useful information when the thing in question looks, at first glance, rather like part of the floor.

OCCHIO!
Watch out! / Careful!

We saw this AMT sign during our weekend in Genoa, a city where getting around can involve buses, elevators, funiculars, and a fair amount of vertical thinking.

Occhio literally means "eye," but by itself as an exclamation, Occhio! means Watch out!, Be careful!, or Pay attention! Treccani specifically lists it as an interjection used to call someone's attention to a danger.

You can also say:

• Occhio alla macchina!
  Watch out for the car!
• Occhio a dove metti i piedi.
  Watch where you step.

The AMT poster has fun with both meanings. It says: Tutti i mezzi AMT sono dotati di molti occhi, quelli delle telecamere e quelli di tutti noi. "All AMT vehicles are equipped with many eyes, those of the cameras and those of all of us."

So OCCHIO! is simultaneously "watch out" and an actual eye, reinforced by the camera lens sitting inside the eye in the image. It is one of those cases where the Italian is considerably more compact than the English explanation required to understand why it works.

A causa delle diverse modalità di trasporto la consegna potrebbe non rispettare la successione del numero di coda.

A fairly literal translation is: “Because of the different methods of transport, delivery may not follow the sequence of the queue numbers.” A more useful translation in context would be: “Because the medications arrive by different transport methods, they may not be dispensed in queue-number order.”

We encountered this sentence while waiting at the Farmacia delle dimissioni at Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo. This is not simply a pharmacy conveniently located near the exit. After a patient is discharged from the hospital with a newly prescribed drug therapy that must continue at home, the Farmacia delle dimissioni can provide the drugs for the first treatment cycle, enough to bridge the period until care passes back to the patient's general practitioner. It also dispenses certain hospital and chronic-therapy medications.

So dimissioni here means hospital discharge, and Farmacia delle dimissioni is reasonably translated as discharge pharmacy.

The sign becomes easier once it is pulled apart:

• a causa delle = because of / due to
• diverse modalità di trasporto = different transport methods
• la consegna = the delivery or, here, dispensing of the medication
• potrebbe non rispettare = might not follow
• la successione = the sequence/order
• del numero di coda = of the queue number

The smaller sign underneath explains what is really going on: the medication kits are handed out in the order in which they arrive from the pharmacy warehouse, which may not match the order in which patients took their queue numbers.

There is even more machinery behind that sentence than we realized. Papa Giovanni uses an automated pharmacy warehouse and a pneumatic transport system to move some medication kits from the warehouse to the Farmacia delle dimissioni.

In other words, if you are number 46 and they call 48 first, this does not necessarily mean the Italian queue has finally abandoned all pretense of numerical order. Number 48's medicine may simply have arrived before yours.

We were already in the intellectually receptive state produced by sitting around watching a hospital queue display, so naturally we photographed the explanation.

Avvistata l'ultima volta nella chiesa di Sant'Alessandro di via Pignolo.

Last seen in the church of Sant'Alessandro on Via Pignolo.


This was a notice for a missing black-and-white cat. What was that cat doing in the church?

The useful verb here is avvistare, from vista. It means to sight or spot something, traditionally with the sense of beginning to see or recognize something from a distance. It turns up particularly in contexts such as sighting a ship, aircraft, person, or something being searched for.

The full sentence could be: È stata avvistata l'ultima volta... She was last seen... On the notice, è stata disappears and we are left with the compressed: Avvistata l'ultima volta...

Also note that it is avvistata, feminine, because the missing animal is una gatta.

English normally reduces the whole idea to the very ordinary "last seen." Italian's avvistata feels closer to last spotted or last sighted, which seems particularly appropriate when everyone in the neighborhood has temporarily become part of a cat-search operation.  

Light a candle in your local church for this cat.

Simil Beagle, femmina, taglia medio/contenuta.
Beagle-like female, small-to-medium size.

This was another missing-animal notice, this time for Bella (who prefers shopping at LIDL over churches?).

The interesting word is simil. It isn't the adjective simile with the final e casually dropped. Simil- is a combining form derived from simile and is used to indicate something with characteristics resembling something else. Treccani gives examples such as similpelle, imitation or synthetic leather.

So simil Beagle means Beagle-like, resembling a Beagle, or, more loosely in English, Beagle type.

We might be tempted to translate it as "Beagle mix," but that says slightly more than the Italian does. Simil Beagle describes appearance or type; it doesn't necessarily make a claim about Bella's actual parentage.

It's useful shorthand for a lost-dog sign. If you don't know exactly what she is, but she looks enough like a Beagle that "Beagle" will help someone recognize her, simil Beagle gets the job done.