Chiusa di Pesio

The Valle Pesio runs fifteen kilometers from the town up to the French border, a wedge of the Ligurian Alps whose municipal territory climbs from 575 meters at the village to over 2,600 meters at the ridge. The town exists because of the Certosa: in 1173 the lords of Morozzo donated upper-valley lands to a Carthusian monk named Ulderich from Casale, and the charterhouse that grew from that gift became one of the great spiritual and forestry centers of medieval Piedmont. Lower-valley woods once managed by the order for chestnut production still supply the harvest that keeps the town in the Città del Castagno network today.

The valley reads as a sequence from village to summit: the settlement at the mouth, the monastery upriver at the foot of Monte Mindino, and above both the high ground of the Marguareis, where karst has hollowed the rock into one of the most extensive cave systems in the Western Alps. A wolf pack, the first stable one documented in the Italian Alps, established itself in this same corridor in the mid-1990s. The valley's history and its wildness sit on top of each other rather than side by side, a monastic economy giving way, without displacing it, to a landscape still wild enough for wolves.