Gli Orsi della Val Mesath by Adriano Roncali

"Gli Orsi della Val Mesath" is a simple, direct book. A collection of short stories about mountain life and mountain people, about these gruff "men", and...

so far from worldliness that they look like bears in body and spirit. But above all men of human warmth, of a hospitality turned into a way of life (and not just for show).

Adriano Roncali is one of those men each of us ends up looking at with a touch of envy, not for the successes he has gathered in life (which ones, anyway?) but for the courage of a life choice against the current. The kind of choice made by a fundamentally free individual, which leads him along the road of a deep awareness. An awareness born of simple things.
Adriano Roncali chooses to go and live in the mountains, to run the Rifugio Casera Ditta and with it to change his own life from the roots... and perhaps to some extent that of his neighbour too, cultivating "things from another time", truer, more sincere... sincere like the wine that is never missing in the home of someone from Friuli or the Veneto...
"Gli Orsi della Val Mesath" is a simple, direct book. A collection of short stories about mountain life and mountain people, about these gruff "men", so far from worldliness that they look like bears in body and spirit. But above all men of human warmth, of a hospitality turned into a way of life (and not just for show). In the same spirit as the Edizioni Biblioteca dell'Immagine, Adriano Roncali's book speaks to its readers of true feelings, of things lived through, of stories made of sweat and toil, of smiles and enthusiasm, of drinking bouts and long winters.
And so those same readers then end up, one way or another, at his hut, in Val Mesath, to get to know him and his mountains, to relive the same enthusiasm together once more,  to live to the full the longing for freedom, the one that leads you onto a mountain path, into a wood with neither rucksack nor provisions.

The language is simple, direct, with no frills. The stories flow quickly, some particularly dense with emotion, others more immediate. All in all a good book, which made me curious to head off to Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

Rifugio Casera Ditta
Adriano Roncali asks for nothing better than to be visited at the hut...