The Alpe
01Far from the noise.
Close to what matters.
Among meadows, woods and mountains, Alpe di Lemna preserves the simple rhythm of mountain life. Each season brings different colours, harvests and moods.
The story
There was almost
nothing here.
Alpe di Lemna sits on a green plateau at 900 metres, in the heart of the Triangolo Lariano — slopes settled in prehistoric times and later by Celtic peoples. The farm itself is much more recent. It begins in 1993, with a mountain pasture nobody was using any more and a man who fell in love with it.
- Before
1993A pasture nobody was using
The small pasture belonged to the municipality and no one had worked it for a long time: the grazing land, the woods and the stone walls were all there, but with no family living on them. Then as now, the only way up was on foot, along the old mule track that climbs from Lemna.
- 1993
Algo Cantaluppi walks up to see it
Algo Cantaluppi, from Como, had long experience with horses and wanted a place of his own. When he heard about the pasture he walked up to see it and fell for it at once: he took it on lease and began the work together with his wife, Elena Cossa. Her mother had tried to talk her out of it — up there, she said, she would end up eating lizards — but Elena went anyway.
- The works
The stables first, then the chalet
He restored the stables and the farm buildings, then built the wooden chalet that became the restaurant. The kitchen worked with what the Alpe produced, and with the dishes still served today: polenta uncia, braised beef, game. Algo's first birthday present to Elena was a chainsaw; hers to him, a pregnant goat named Rudy. Presents up here have always been of that kind.
- The early
yearsThen word of mouth did the rest
At first nobody knew the Alpe was up here. Then, partly by word of mouth and partly through advertising, people began to walk up: from Como, from Brianza, from Milan. They found goats, geese, cows, newborn kids and three big sheepdogs. And the horses, which went out to pasture in the evening and came back on their own in the morning.
- Late
NinetiesThe horses and the old stone farmhouse
For years horses were the heart of the place: riding treks across the Triangolo Lariano, from a single day up to a week, plus stabling for other people's horses. Meanwhile Algo and Elena restored an old farmhouse in bare stone, which would become their own home.
- Twenty years
onForty-five hectares to keep from the woods
By 2012 the four of them were the only people living up here. There is no drinking water, just a seventy-thousand-litre tank that fills when it rains; no landline reaches the Alpe, and the house is as warm as the wood stove makes it. There are forty-five hectares of pasture to defend from the advancing woodland, and animals to look after every day. In winter Martino and Giacomo rode down to the jeep on a snowmobile to get to school, up before six. Martino was studying agriculture and wanted to be a woodsman; Giacomo wanted to cook — in a trattoria, though, not a grand hotel.
- Today
One family, for thirty years
Algo and Elena have run the Alpe since 1993, and their sons Martino and Giacomo now work alongside them. The riding treks are no longer offered; otherwise little has changed. You still come up on foot, the animals still live in the meadows and woods around the farmhouse, and the cooking is still home cooking. Those who want to stay sleep in the two rooms built into the stone and beams of the old building.
The early years
The Alpe in 2012
The account of the farm's origins comes from an article by Sabina Livio published in 1999. The story of life up here twenty years later, and the 2012 photographs, come from Giuseppe Guin's feature in mag, the magazine of La Provincia.
Daily life
The animals of the Alpe
Horses, goats, sheep, cows and the other residents of the farm live among meadows, barns and woods.
Breathe
Every season changes the landscape.
Never the feeling of arriving here.
