Monte Cava by the “Bolivians' route”...

Talk about a lucky day.... The premise, as always, is the sun, especially in autumn when the cold is already biting and the days are short. It's essential to have a warm hand on your shoulders to keep you company...

The ingredients for an excellent hike are few: a good landscape and a mountain to discover, but above all excellent company. And when, to prepare the hike, all you have to do is knock on your neighbour's door, then everything is even easier.
There aren't even those pre-dawn wake-ups that wreck your whole day. We meet at 6.30 outside the front door. Come on, let's admit it.... by now we're at the triumph of laziness.... which is a real paradox for two lunatics who are off to knock out over a thousand metres of ascent and eleven kilometres on foot among leaves, dry branches and loose rubble.

The hike up the Valle Amara is to take us up to a place that has always been very dear to me: the century-old beech woods of the Prato di San Rocco, known on some maps as Prato di Ceraso.
I have long dreamt of taking my children there, to let them know the breath of the beeches and of nature, to let them know the peace of a mountain meadow, the scent of fresh air and the smells of the undergrowth.
It's well into November and the trees are already bare, but I still remember very well the Valle Amara dressed in its autumn clothes. The yellow, red and green trees left you dumbstruck with the intensity of their colours.

We walked in the rain without hurrying, enjoying the scents and colours of autumn. Definitely a place to visit with children; I talk about it with Massimo, who also dreams of the moment when he will start introducing his little Lorenzo to the mountains.

In fact the Valle Amara can be walked perfectly well up to the meadows of Ceraso without any technical or route-finding problems. The dirt track goes practically up to 1500 m without any particular damage. With a bit of effort children can easily walk the five kilometres from the cars to the meadows of the Cerasolo in a couple of hours.
The path is marked with red-yellow-green waymarks... the well-known Bolivian flag. The joke comes naturally; the waymark reminds him of something and he comes out with:  “this is the Bulgarians' route“
In fact we feel like Eastern European smugglers, without knowing what we're smuggling...

We'll find out at home that, rather than a Bulgarian flag, it is in fact the Bolivian flag... all the more reason why that flag would have suited the rest of the hike too.
The truth is that we're here to “put some miles in our legs”, as they say, and as far as I'm concerned I'm here to go back up Monte Cava to check whether I had really climbed it the first time.
Massimo has already been up the Cava twice, the gateway to the Apennines, the perfect 2000, and this would be his third ascent.

The walk up the Valle Amara, which is on a dirt track, is so quick that in less than an hour and a half we find ourselves at the Mercaturo, the bend where there is still the sign pointing to the start of the Valle dell'Asino.

Back then fog caught us high up and we decided that a little heap of stones simply had to be the summit; a pity that our estimate was out by a good 400 metres. My exasperated intellectual honesty requires me to come back to this summit to check whether I have really been there.

Talking with Massimo about this habit of collecting summits, I discover that we share a cultural background with some similarities. He tells me how, when he started climbing, he would stay just below the summit for about ten minutes, practising the exercise of not setting foot on it. It's about the capacity for “renunciation” and “detachment” from the morbid urge to possess a summit.  It's a difficult concept.

Western cultures tend to take possession of the things of the world... even the very idea of collecting summits is a way of believing that you have taken possession of the mountain. But what does it mean, what does it really mean... in fact it's a false sense of possession.
Getting to within twenty metres of a summit and giving it up is an exercise that can help you understand and accept, with greater awareness, the sense of the impermanence of things. Everything changes, nothing is forever and nothing belongs to us. The desire to possess even just the memory of having been there is a morbid desire of attachment to the things of the past. This kind of attachment (to ideas, to idealised memories, to desires) can only make us short-sighted about the future and possessive with others, unable to progress and to change.

Anyway, to cut a long story short... we say all this to each other in a couple of words, because we're certainly not in the mood to philosophise too much. I know Massimo used to practise yoga, and this tells me about his inclination to make certain reflections on existence.

Funny, because it reminds me of a question a friend once asked me, whether I went to the mountains for athletic and sporting reasons or for essentially philosophical ones. That was certainly my main motive. Mind you, the physical activity you do in the mountains has no equal. You walk for 5-6-7-8 or even 10 hours; when you get home you feel wrecked but also  free of tension and in great physical shape.
Yes, I believe that in itself hiking manages to bring body and mind into tune; I couldn't give it up.

We reach the summit of Monte Cava, happy to have discovered that even a great rounded hump like this one can have its own scenic interest. The last stretch involves a short up-and-down over a high meadow and a final steep pull that we certainly hadn't walked a few years before.
Probably an error in the distance estimate of over 400 metres... but with all that fog could we have done otherwise?

At the top the wind is cold and blowing from the north. We hide among the small rocks to eat a sandwich quickly and start straight back down. The sweat quickly freezes on our skin; better not to stay exposed to the summit wind.

For the descent we decide to take the direct route that passes below the hill “Il Cocuruzzo” (1794 m). Level with the saddle linking Monte Cava and Cocuruzzo you can clearly make out a small gully, “Il fosso del Cerreto”.

This is where our real Bolivian adventure begins. The Fosso del Cerreto comes down exactly near the San Rocco hydroelectric power station, right where we had left the car. The choice of taking the shortest way down will turn out to be full of surprises. The gully, although not too crowded with plants, brambles and brushwood, is still an awkward place to move about in. All you would have to do is follow the bed of the gully down to the power station and job done.

But when you have to thrash about among the brushwood, the sticky ivy, the stones hidden under twenty centimetres of dry leaves, when you have to go first under the branch, then over the trunk, stop your rucksack getting caught in the branches, push aside the thorny bushes so as not to tear your jacket... well, this feels for all the world like an experience in extreme lands... a sort of Bolivian route, or rather an Amazonian route, an equatorial jungle, a virgin forest... wild, in short, even if you're less than 500 metres from the motorway.

Among the brushwood we even seem to catch the smell of truffles.. it's a fully bucolic experience. So bucolic that we end up coming across a plant we'd like to mistake for marijuana. Maybe it's just some Dentaria or another weed with no properties at all. All that's missing is to come across wild strawberries... - Did you bring the little basket? It's one joke after another; it's that carefree, cheerful way typical of Massimo, a unique lightness that makes any hike simple. Even the most tangled vegetable thrash.

True enough, our boots are itching... In the wood managed by the local commons, a network
of paths that start nowhere and lead nowhere ends up first taking us out of the gully and then back into it... The Bolivians' direct route is done in less than an hour and three quarters ...

All things considered... I don't know... if I had to recommend a climb up Monte Cava from the San Rocco power station … well, I'd say the route is only partly waymarked and certainly isn't comfortable... but we're certainly not people who want to be comfortable... otherwise we'd have stayed at home watching the football... wouldn't we?