You wake in the morning and see the Langa del Sole stretching over the top of a hill. The sky is skinny strip of blue being pushed higher and higher by the rolls of the hills, their obscure shapes forcing air upwards, to the side, down a ravine, through the imperceptible spaces between the oak leaves and over the branches of the tree, one dry from the sun and the other a sprightly green, a new bud not ready to succumb to the autumn.

It is not just the sky that attracts your eye. It is the land, caressed by the sun. Dark green, light green, green-red, green-yellow, emerald and amaranth: a stormy ‘sea’ of hills, dark waves turned to stone. Explosions of woods, like the ocean spray, froth densely over the hills, only occasionally interrupted by the golden glimmer of an open field. Your gaze is conquered by views of extraordinary, the pastoral exotic, the rural escape, the land that pulsates with the rhythms of the ancestral life.

Here, what matters is simply what is below and what is inside. The paths that lead to the rivers, the autumn mires, the oak leaves, the limestone headlands that rise no matter how many feet have trodden. You are always below, within, in the middle of the Langa del Sole. These hills force you to feel with your body the wild force of life in every vine, every branch, every animal; the life within each wall that abounds outwards, seemingly motionless in its ease, of each farmhouse and village where the people, shyly but proudly welcoming, call home.