Reserve a week, three weeks or a season in Valle Maira, Piedmont

Valle Maira leaves the plain at Dronero, 622 meters, and runs about 45 kilometers west into the Cottian Alps until the asphalt gives out at Chiappera, 1,614 meters, under a pale limestone tower that stands more or less straight up out of the meadow. There is no through road and no pass at the head of it. Whatever comes up the valley has to come back down the same way it went in, and that one fact organizes everything else: the bread van, the school bus, the mail, the price of a house, and the number of people who wander in by accident on a Sunday afternoon, which is close to none.

A hundred and forty years ago something like twenty thousand people farmed these slopes on terraces built by hand. The resident count now sits near 1,200, and most of that lives in the four lowest villages. Whole hamlets above 1,400 meters were walked away from between 1950 and 1975 with the roofs still sound. A number of them are still empty and will stay empty. Others have been bought back one house at a time by people who wanted a winter with no traffic noise in it, who put the slate back on and the stove in, and who now let the house for part of the year. Those are the houses this office reserves.

You can take one of them for seven nights, for twenty one, or for fifty six. They are not one product in three sizes.

The difference between them is not how much walking you get. It is how much of the valley's own timetable you are inside of. Seven nights leaves you outside it, looking in, which is a perfectly reasonable place to stand. Twenty one puts you in it. Fifty six makes you part of the arithmetic of the place, including its dull parts, and the dull parts are most of it.

From the plain to the rock wall

The valley runs roughly east to west, so one flank has sun on it all day and the other has very little. The Occitan words for the two sides are still in daily use here and they are not decorative: a house on the shaded flank at Stroppo can go from the middle of November to the first days of February without direct sun on its front wall, while a house 600 meters away across the water is in full light by nine in the morning. Rent follows that, and so does firewood, because the shaded houses burn about a third more of it over a winter.

Going up from the mouth the villages are Dronero, Macra, Celle, San Damiano, Stroppo, Marmora, Prazzo, Canosio, Acceglio, and Chiappera at the end of the road. Elva sits apart at 1,637 meters on a shelf above a gorge, reached either by a single lane road cut into the rock face with passing bays and no railing worth the name, or, when that road is closed for rockfall work, by a long climb over the pass from the next valley. Elva has a parish church holding a wall of frescoes finished in the 1490s, about a hundred and ninety people in August and something under ninety who stay for the winter.

Above the last houses the ground goes up quickly. Rocca La Meja stands at 2,831 meters and is visible from most of the upper valley as a pale fin of limestone with nothing else like it nearby. Monte Chersogno reaches 3,026. A military road built to move guns runs the ridge line at around 2,000 meters for some twenty kilometers and is now the easiest walking in the valley, because it was engineered for wheels and it holds its grade.

What the second and third weeks do

A week here is a sequence of arrivals. You get to the house on a Saturday, you find out on Sunday that the shop in the village below is closed on Sunday and again on Monday, you walk two of the better known days, you drive one pass if it is the right half of the year, and you go home. Nothing is wrong with that and for a lot of people it is the right purchase.

Three weeks is a different object entirely. The change arrives around day nine, when the valley stops being scenery and turns into a place with a schedule you can be late for. You learn that the van with bread and milk reaches the high hamlets on Tuesday and Friday and is gone by half past eight, so on the second Friday you are outside at twenty past. You work out which of the two bars in the middle valley has the man who knows where the water comes from and who fixes it. You get one whole week of weather that shuts you indoors with a stove and whatever you brought to read, which almost never happens inside seven nights, and you find out whether you actually like that or were only telling yourself you would. By the third week you are on tracks with no numbers on them, because somebody drew you one on the back of a receipt.

Eight weeks, and what stops being remarkable

A season is fifty six nights and most of them are ordinary. That is the honest description of it, and anyone selling you eight weeks as eight weeks of the good bits is selling something other than this valley.

Here is what actually changes. You come in during the second half of June with the pass newly open and the hay not yet down, and you leave in the third week of August with cold nights already arriving. In between you watch a whole working summer. The hay comes in across about ten days in July and everyone who still farms is out on the slopes from six in the morning, which means the bar is empty at lunch and full at nine. The herds go up to the high pastures in the last days of June, and the cheese made up there does not taste the same in August as it did in July. You will be able to tell the difference, which is not something a person can do in seven nights.

The domestic arithmetic changes too. Nobody strips and remakes a room that is not being handed over every Saturday, and nobody drives up the valley to clean it. After the first two weeks you do your own laundry, because the woman who was charging you for it will tell you without much ceremony that this is silly. You buy your own gas bottle instead of having one delivered. The three figures above carry all of that inside them: $359 a night across the week, $283 a night across the three weeks, $222 a night across the season. They are not the same figure, and the reason is mechanical rather than gracious. A room let for eight weeks is turned over once, not eight times.

What this office reserves, and who writes the bill

Slow Latitudes works from one office at 9422 Common Street, Suite 2, Baton Rouge, LA 70809, in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It reserves the house or the pension room, the ground transfer up from the plain, a rental car from the town at the valley mouth, and the guided days you want. Not one house, room or vehicle described on this page belongs to Slow Latitudes Bookings LLC. The families who own them let them under their own names and their own licenses, and your invoice is written by the people who unlock the door for you, never by this office. Nothing is paid here and no card number is taken here.

This office sells no air ticket. Getting yourself as far as the plain stays your own arrangement, and the last 45 kilometers is the part we handle.

Ask by telephone at +1 (225) 766-2418, or in writing to bookings@slowlatitudes.com with the weeks you have in mind and how many of you there are. Pricing the exact dates you name takes two to four working days, because the answer has to come back up the valley from people who are frequently out on a slope with a machine, and a same day figure would be a guess. If something in a reservation already made needs correcting, write to corrections@slowlatitudes.com with the reference on the subject line. Entry rules for Italy sit between you and the authority that issues them, and this office does not advise on them.