A Short Post About a Long Hike - Vò Valley to Rifugio Tagliaferri

Overview ~ The Route ~ Photos ~ Flora

  

Left: Malga Venano di sopra (1870 m). Center: Baita Malga Venano di sopra. Right: A mossy beginning to trail 413.

Sometimes you have to wait to get or do something, and it’s worth it and you are probably better for it. Case in point: a hike to Rifugio Tagliaferri via the Valley Vò. We were supposed to go on Saturday with friends and for various reasons it didn’t happen and we were bummed. Then, a few days later on Wednesday, we decided to give it a go, just the two of us, and it was magical and worth the wait (and less crowded).

Overview

Length: 22.6 km
Elevation Gain: 1270 m
Duration: 8.25 hours (about 6 hours moving)
Highest Point: 2331 m
Starting Point: 1067 m
Destination: Rifugio Tagliaferri

The Route

The CAI Sentiero 413: Schilpario - Rifugio Tagliaferri is what we followed except for a small deviation on the last part going, which was more a “direct” route and not really worth the hassle and the sweat. Our advice, follow Sentiero 413 up and back. Easy-peasy.

The first 30 minutes of the hike are in a forest of spruce, mountain pine, alder, and hazelnut trees. The Vò torrente is always nearby and visible at times through the trees. Then the forest opens up to pastures. As you climb the mule track you come across: the Baita del Venano di sotto (1542 m), the Baita del Venano di mezzo (1679 m) and the Baita di Venano di sopra (1859 m). At the uppermost baita we saw a herd of about 1000 Pecora Gigante Bergamasca (Bergamasque Giant sheep), a massive Italian breed native to the mountainous valleys of Bergamo. The shepherd said he had been doing his job for 50 years and was ready for retirement. What does retirement look like for a shepherd?

We visited Rifugio Nani Tagliaferri back in 2019 approaching the rifugio from the adjacent valley with the Gleno Dam. See the post A Hike to Rifugio Tagliaferri via Val di Gleno. It was fun to come back and visit. This rifugio is the highest in the Bergamasque Alps at 2328 m. It’s also interesting for the story of why it was built.

The namesake of the rifugio, Nani Tagliaferri, was a mountaineer from Bergamo whose life and spirit embodied the rugged devotion to the Orobie Alps. His untimely death in in 1981 in the Peruvian Andes inspired his brother Francesco and a group of close friends resolved to honor his memory in a way that reflected his spirit—by building a refuge at altitude, where others could experience the same communion with the landscape that had shaped him.

The rifugio’s construction in the 1980s followed the logic of the military mule tracks of the surrounding valleys—meticulously graded, drained, and reinforced—linking the alpine valleys of Scalve and Valtellina. Set amid the Orobie Alps, the refuge overlooks a panorama that sweeps from the Bernina and Disgrazia groups to the peaks of Camino, Bagozza, and Concarena.

One botanical note: we saw so many raspberries on this hike. We sampled all along the trail, and they were good.

Photos

  

Left: Heading back down the mountain to to Malga Venano di sopra on trail 413.

Center: Last bit of the direct trail to reach Rifugio Tagliaferri.
Right: Sheep in Malga Venano di sopra.

  
Left: Leaving the rifugio on trail 413.

Center: Looking down on Malga Venano di sopra.

Right: View from the trail looking south toward Pizzo Camino.

  

Left: Trail 413 starts out gentle in the forest.

Center: Trail 413 goes by two small lakes in the upper reaches.

Right: View of Pizzo Tornello (2687 m).

  

Left: Venano di sopra conca.

Center: Trail - View from trail up to rifugio (hidden).

Right: Trail - Malga Venano di sopra – shepherd's hut.

   
Left: Rifugio Tagliaferri - special dish of the rifugio.

Center left: Rifugio Tagliaferri – spezzatino.

Center right: Rifugio Tagliaferri – dishes for a group of hikers

Right: Rifugio Tagliaferri - in the kitchen.


  

Left: Sign about charcoal production.

Center: Trail Sign at Malga Venano di sopra (1870 m).

Right: Just below the rifugio, out of sight.

Flora

[Apiaceae] Bupleurum sp.

[Asteraceae] Leontopodium nivale - edelweiss
 

[Asteraceae] Carlina acaulis

 

[Asteraceae] flower


[Campanulaceae] Campanula sp.

 

[Caryophyllaceae] Lychnis flos-cuculi

[Crassulaceae] Rhodiola rosea
  

[Crassulaceae] Sempervivum montanum
 

[Papaveraceae] Pseudofumaria lutea


[Rosaceae] Potentilla sp.


[Rosaceae] Rubus idaeus


[Saxifragaceae] Saxifraga aizoides

Foreign at Ciao: Ten Years of Speaking Italian

One World is Enough ~ The R Bar ~ The Woman Who Disappeared ~ 

What Our Italian Can Do ~ My Grandfather Was American ~ Foreign at Ciao

 

We enter a bar, a shop, or an office and say ciao.

“Di dove siete?”

One word is often enough. We haven't ordered, explained our problem, or asked where the bathroom is. Nonetheless, the international portion of the conversation has begun.

This is not a big deal in the scheme of things. The question is usually friendly, and often it leads somewhere interesting. We have met people, exchanged travel stories, and explained many times how two Americans ended up living in Bergamo. Still, after ten years, there are mornings when we would prefer simply to order a macchiato.

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that we write about our odyssey with the Italian language. We have dozens of posts (TravelMarx: Italian Language) on the subject. We love Italian, we love living in Italy, and our lives here would be impossible without the language. But affection does not eliminate frustration.

After ten years, we speak enough Italian to live in Italy, but perhaps not enough to disappear into it.

One Word is Enough

“Where are you from?” after a single ciao demonstrates how quickly we can be identified and sorted. The question may be nothing more than curiosity or an easy way to make conversation. Repeated hundreds of times, however, curiosity can begin to feel a little like border control that you weren't expecting.

What tires us is not being foreign. We are foreign. It is the speed with which foreignness can become the subject, pushing aside whatever we were trying to say or do. How we pronounce the words becomes more interesting than the words themselves.

Italy has a highly tuned linguistic ear. Italians identify one another by pronunciation, vocabulary, rhythm, and regional cadence. A few sentences may reveal that someone is Bergamasco, Roman, Neapolitan, Sardinian, educated, provincial, working class, or trying rather hard not to sound like any of those things. Italians are not only locating foreigners through language. They have long been locating one another.

The difference is that a regional accent usually places an Italian somewhere within Italy. Our accent places us outside it.  We can get placed "outside" of Italy anywhere from Germany, the Netherlands, England, or the US. It's a slight chuckle on our part when we asked if we are German.

We touched on this feeling in Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad, where we described our accent as a kind of passport carried in our voices. That post considered the larger experience of living between cultures. In this post, we want to stay with one small but persistent part of it: how a single ciao can locate us before the conversation has really begun.

That may be all that is happening after ciao: a person hears something unexpected and asks a natural question. But repeated over years, the exchange begins to carry a little more weight. It reminds us that we may participate fully in the conversation while never becoming acoustically invisible within it.

The R Bar

The Italian r has become our recurring symbol of linguistic struggles.  Someone rolls an extravagant r for us. We try to reproduce it. What comes out is recognizably an r, but not the correct kind. Everyone laughs, including us. Then we try again, with greater concentration and usually worse results.

Repeat for ten years.

The joke is affectionate. We understand that. Often the person correcting us is genuinely trying to help, and we would not want people to stop correcting us altogether. The tiring part is how easily the correction can take over the conversation. We may be explaining something complicated, making a joke, or telling a story, but one poorly executed r suddenly becomes the most interesting thing at the table. The message briefly disappears behind the delivery.

In that moment, the Italian r seems to outweigh years of vocabulary, grammar, residence permits, utility bills, medical appointments, friendships, misunderstandings, and daily life. We may have explained the problem perfectly, but we have not rolled the r with sufficient authority.

Perhaps this does not mean we failed to work hard enough. Adult learners vary greatly in their ability to perceive and reproduce unfamiliar sounds, and late learners (like us) commonly retain a non-native accent even at high levels of proficiency. According to the research A hypothesis on improving foreign accents by optimizing variability in vocal learning brain circuits adults learn foreign pronunciation poorly because they stop experimenting too soon and the result is a foreign accent. (This is research to follow up on!)

Many people like us who learn a language later in life retain an accent even when they speak fluently. At some point, the mouth seems to settle on its preferred collection of sounds. Ours settled before it encountered the Italian r.

The Woman Who Disappeared

We went to a party recently where many of the guests had international backgrounds. One English woman had lived in Italy for more than twenty years. She had married an Italian, raised children here, studied languages, and could move easily between English and Italian.

A few days later, a friend who had attended the same party remarked on how perfectly she spoke. He had to listen closely to tell that she was not Italian.

His admiration was generous, and deserved. Still, I felt a brief flash of envy. Apparently, there was a finish line after all, and we haven't passed it (yet).

The English woman had achieved a kind of native invisibility. Her Italian no longer announced her before she had a chance to say anything else. She could enter a conversation without immediately becoming the foreign person in it.

Do we want the same thing?

Yes and no.

We do not necessarily want to disappear. The way we speak is part of who we are and how we think. Our accents record where we came from, when we learned Italian, and the fact that another language still lives close beneath the surface.

But we would like the option to disappear now and then.

Sometimes we want to say ciao, order a coffee, and not explain how two Americans ended up in Bergamo. Sometimes we want the conversation to continue without turning toward our pronunciation, our origins, or the inevitable question: “Why Bergamo?”

What Our Italian Can Do

It is easy to measure our Italian by what it cannot do.

It cannot disguise us. It cannot reliably roll an r. It cannot always keep pace with a crowded dinner table when three people are speaking at once and a fourth is beginning a story from the middle.

But isn't this a strange way to measure your language ability?

Thinking about the woman at the party also forced us to take stock of what our own Italian can do.

It has built a life. It gets us through bureaucracy, friendships, driving exams, meals, repairs, jokes, and misunderstandings. It allows us to participate, not perfectly and not invisibly, but fully enough to belong to the life we are living. That's all good.

Also, our language level has allowed us to notice things we would otherwise miss. We hear differences between formal and informal speech. We recognize regional expressions. We stop at signs and wonder why Italian phrases an instruction one way while English would phrase it another. We may not speak like native Italians, but we no longer experience Italian as noise passing around us and because of our gap, we notice more. Or, that's our hope!

There are, of course, limits. In a fast conversation, we may arrive at the perfect response several seconds too late. A joke may need to be explained, which is rarely an improvement. Some days our Italian feels fluent; on others, we struggle to assemble a sentence we are certain we used successfully the day before.

Still, "medium-level Italian" may be an unfair description. Medium compared with what? A native speaker? The English woman at the party? An imaginary version of ourselves who studied the congiuntivo (subjuncitve) every evening instead of doing something else?

Perhaps the more useful measure is not whether we can pass as Italian, but whether our Italian language level allows us to participate in the life around us. And by that measure, it works.

Our Italian is imperfect, accented, and occasionally held together with gestures. It is also durable. It gets us through the day and into conversations, relationships, and situations that would otherwise remain closed to us. That may not be mastery. It is not invisibility. But it is much more than nothing.

My Grandfather Was American

The United States is hardly innocent when it comes to judging people by the way they speak. Accents can affect how people are treated at work, in public, and in everyday conversation. Race and class are often tangled up in those judgments. Someone can be born in the United States and still be asked where they are "really" from.

Still, that was not how I understood American identity growing up.

My grandfather was born in the United States to Italian parents. He spoke and wrote English imperfectly and was possibly illiterate. In an earlier post, A Happy Sound in the Grotto, I wrote about the sounds he made while sitting at the kitchen table, working slowly through the newspaper. His limited literacy was part of his history. It was never evidence that he was somehow less American. He did not have to pass linguistically.

Perhaps that is because the United States tells itself that it is a country made from arrivals. The story is often contradicted by the country’s behavior, but the story still matters. An accent may identify someone as Italian American, Chinese American, Southern, Midwestern, working class, or recently arrived. It can place a person within a complicated American landscape without necessarily removing them from it.

Italy tells itself a different story, one built more around place, family, town, region, and inherited culture. This is curious because Italy contains enormous linguistic variety. Italians have always used pronunciation and vocabulary to locate one another. Yet a regional accent usually places an Italian somewhere within Italy. Our accent more often seems to raise the prior question of whether we belong inside the category at all.

That may be too simple a comparison. Perhaps I remember the United States generously because it was where I grew up and experience Italy more critically because I am still learning how to inhabit it. Perhaps this is rosy retrospection with an American accent?

But the difference continues to feel real.

My grandfather’s imperfect English did not make his nationality conditional. Our imperfect Italian can sometimes make our connection to Italy feel provisional, even after ten years of living here.

Maybe that is the question beneath all the questions that follow ciao: not simply where we came from, but how a person who came from somewhere else can ever become fully from here.

Foreign at Ciao

So, where are we in this discussion? After ten years, we speak enough Italian to live in Italy, but perhaps not enough to disappear into it.

Fine.

We may never be mistaken for Italians, at least not once we open our mouths. But being mistaken for Italian may be the wrong measure.

The woman at the party could pass. We cannot. Yet passing is only one form of belonging, and perhaps not the most important one. A perfect accent can conceal a history. An imperfect one can reveal it in interesting ways.

Our accents record lives lived in two languages. They tell people that we arrived from somewhere else and learned Italian later. They do not tell them how long we've been here, what we understand, what we contribute, or how thoroughly we have made Italy home.

Perhaps this is what people are trying to discover when they ask where we are from. The question may be less a judgment than an opening, an attempt to place us within the story they already understand.

Still, there is a difference between being welcomed and being unremarkable.

We have been welcomed. That is for sure. We have built friendships, routines, and a life in Italian. We participate fully, even if we do so audibly as foreigners. What we may never achieve is the ordinary privilege of passing unnoticed. But, there are worse things in life.

Remaining recognizable as ourselves while living in another language may be a more modest achievement than mastery, but it is also a more interesting one. We do not need our Italian to erase where we came from. We need it to carry us further into where we are.

Even if, immediately after ciao, we are sometimes asked to explain the whole journey before we have managed to order the macchiato.

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 on this site by the CAI Bergamo section in 1923 was dedicated to the four Calvi brothers. Following damage and neglect during World War II, a larger rifugio was built nearby 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