Hiking is like being a lightweight pencil

On Altripiani trips, we often find that we are the only people in a certain terrain at a certain time. We are surrounded by nature and have the privilege to take in the landscape and photograpgh it, with no one else around.

It is a magical sensation. You have just taken a wonderful landscape photo and all of a sudden you yourself are a dot in this infinity of colours. You are part of it, something unique, which is rare nowadays. You feel alone and you feel good. A reason for moving on, for letting curiosity take you beyond that mountain and discovering what still lies ahead. Whenever exhaustion is upon us, we remind ourselves to keep going, as every time we make progress to a new landscape, we will be rewarded with a higher, broader view.
The solidarity we felt out here might resemble that moment when you see a slope of untouched snow. You begin to slide your skis along the fresh snow, pressing down on your legs with force to line up that first curve.
What we continuously see with our eyes affects our soul and begins to circulate within us. Every day spent out here, results in another night of peacefully unrolling our sleeping bag before falling fast asleep. There are entire days where we don't see a soul and we can really pick and choose where to pitch up our tents for the night. Other times we move from one village to the next, “escorted” by curious children or inquisitive elderly people who ask us where we've come from and in what direction we are headed. We are invited into the Berber houses for tea by almost every local, both to indulge in conversation and to escape the heat of the outdoors. Sometimes, however, we prefer to continue hiking without breaking the pace, because over the years we have learned that a glass of tea in Morocco often turns into a full-course meal.

Ever since we started to slowly cross the mountain chains and plotting new itineraries, I have found that I love reading the map with the local people. It is sometimes difficult to find detailed maps, so before we set out across these mountain chains, I study satellite photos which I print out and carefully laminate. Finding your way in an unfamiliar territory, with unfamiliar landscapes might prove difficult, but that is the exciting thing about adventure.

Travelling light without realising it, you enter the hearts of people with a free mind and the strength of mutual curiosity. We often feel like a lightweight pencil sketching out a map of new paths, replete with more and more precious identities, ready to bear witness to the beauty and fragility of these remote places.

ALTRIPIANI

The Altripiani project is a combination of photography, mountaineering, cultural, anthropological and linguistics research. Its goal is to trace new paths and different routes. Lines that do not run from one city to another, but which slowly cross mountain chains and small villages in search of faces and memories.

We are two attentive and curious kids: Giacomo is a photographer born and raised in Venice, as well as a mountain enthusiast and creator of the project. Glorija, is a multilingual Istrian girl, who is the main communicator during these trips.

The idea came about in 2015 as the result of Giacomo’s passions and studies. He drew the first line of the project with an anthropologist friend as they explored the Caucasus mountains up to the Iranian plateaus. Together with Glorija, in 2016 he embarked on the trip over the Carpathian Mountains in Central-Eastern Europe, and since 2017 the two of them have crossed the High Atlas in Morocco several times. The projects intention is to encounter and investigate religious and cultural differences in the countries and plateaus that have been crossed. We want to find people in the most isolated ecological communities in the mountains, (while avoiding the common places) to hopefully sit down and learn as much as we can about their way of life. Altripiani looks for remote places where the physical map is more helpful than the political one. We believe in experiencing situations in which an old map is more accurate than a GPS, as it preserves character of the city and gives you a sense of culture.

The project has a goal of sharing authentic stories about life, living and showcasing them through breath-taking landscape.

www.altripiani.org