“SO YOU’RE SAYING they carried his head all the way up here?” That was indeed what I was saying. Or, at least, that’s what I’d read. We were on the so-called Strette del Casè, an exposed, unforgiving ridge in Val Grande, northern Italy, wondering about the violent events that gave this isolated place its name.
CHEESEMAKER’S RIDGE
Back in the 13th Century, the story goes, two local villages are in a feud over land. In a grisly escalation, someone seizes a cheesemaker, or casaro (casè in dialect), from the enemy village. This casè is decapitated and his head is stuck on a spike up here on this ridge, amongst these gnarled spires and craggy gorges, to mark the border of the two regions. To this day, this complex rocky outcrop–the Ridge of the Cheesemaker–bears his memory, as well as a plaque, dated 1982, that declares friendship between the two villages. It only took them 600 years.
Today, Val Grande, in the pre-Alps of Piedmont, is known as Italy’s largest wilderness–a ragged, undulating bowl of forest the size of Milan. It takes a day of steep walking just to enter, a protected natural zone where it’s now illegal to set foot. By any European measure, we were in the middle of nowhere.
