Sulle Alpi. Un viaggio sentimentale

“Roads branch off into smaller roads and even smaller paths,” wrote Milan Kundera. ‘Woodcutters walk along the paths. On the roads there are benches from which you can see a landscape full of grazing sheep and cows. It is Europe, it is the heart of Europe, it is the Alps.’ In this book, Daniele Zovi sets off on a journey that is also an inner journey, discovering a world that is both near and far, symbolic and real. He recounts the herbariums of Camillo Sbarbaro, an internationally renowned lichenologist as well as a poet: true “samples of the world” because, as he wrote, “collecting plants is collecting places”; and then the Monginevro Pass, probably crossed by Hannibal and his elephants; the light of Mont Blanc described by Goethe; the Walser community in Macugnaga; the sculptures of Marco Martalar: lions, eagles and dragons built from the remains of the forests devastated by Storm Vaia. He observes nature, listens to animals, discovers silence and imagines the lives of others: what he recounts is a sentimental and cognitive journey that seems inexhaustible.