In Alta Langa
People. Moments. Traces that remain.
It began with a holiday
In 2011, we came to Murazzano for the first time. We knew very little about Piedmont and even less about Alta Langa. Yet we had long been drinking wine from this area in Germany. We simply did not know what the landscape it came from looked like.
We stayed in an old rustico outside the village. On the drives to Murazzano, that tower on the hill would eventually appear, with the houses, the piazza and the narrow streets below it. A place we did not know, yet one that soon began to feel familiar. After a few weeks, we drove back to Germany. The following year, we returned.
Eventually, you know the faces
One holiday became many. We walked the same streets, sat in the same bars and shopped in the same places. In time, no one needed to explain where things were. We knew the bends in the road, when the market was held on the piazza and what kind of weather made the hills suddenly disappear in the evening.
Above all, we eventually knew the faces. People greeted us. A Buongiorno sometimes became a Bondì, a brief conversation became ten minutes, and ten minutes sometimes became a coffee. It was rarely the big things that we later talked about in Germany. More often it was someone moving a chair into the sun outside the bar, an open door, a conversation we understood only half of, the sound of plates from a kitchen, or a dog lying outside the same house every morning.
Returning became staying
For many years, our life unfolded between Germany and Alta Langa. We left and came back. With each year, arriving felt more natural and leaving a little stranger. Eventually, we found a house here.
Weeks became months. The place we travelled to slowly became the place we lived from.
Today, our home and the office of Servodigitale are in the heart of Murazzano, on the small Piazza Umberto. Next door, Martina cuts the hair of people from the village, while Cristiana and Claudio Viola run the tobacconist's.
In the morning, a door opens somewhere, someone puts a chair outside, two people stop in the street for a conversation. In the middle of it all, we sit in front of our screens.
Perhaps that is exactly where In Alta Langa begins.
The things we remember
When visiting a region, there is much to see: churches, towers, landscapes, old houses. But years later, we often remember something else. The man at the next table. The woman behind the counter who already knew which coffee we would order on our second visit. An evening on a piazza when nothing special happened. A road suddenly covered in fog. A simple Bondì in the morning.
At some point, we understood that our memories of Alta Langa are made of precisely these things. Not one grand story, but many small ones.
A place is made of stories
That is how In Alta Langa came about. Not as a travel guide, not as a directory of restaurants, shops or places to stay, and not as a collection of things that simply must be seen.
We tell the stories of places and the people in them. A village can be as much a story as a bar, a tennis court, a workshop, a house waiting for new residents, or someone who unlocks the same door every morning. Some things have existed for generations; others have only just begun. They all belong to the same place.
A map that will never be finished
We sometimes imagine Alta Langa as a mosaic. Each story is only one small piece. Murazzano is one of them. A bar may be the next, an encounter another. In time, another village is added, a road, a festival, or a person whose story we do not yet know.
With every visit, the map grows a little larger. But it will probably never be finished. Nor should it be. Because while we write one story down, the next has already begun somewhere else. Perhaps outside an open door, on a bench, or at a small table on the piazza where two glasses are standing.
And sometimes it simply begins with a:
Bondì.