Trentino. And there’s no coming back

Hi, my name is Giulia, I am thirty one years old, I am a food blogger and I’ve never been in the mountains in winter.

This is how I would present myself until a month ago. Then I met a group of new friends, including Mattia and Tommy, two mountain lovers with Trentino tattooed on their hearts, and my 2013 took an unexpected turn.

The new year began near Trento, with a first snowshoe hike and the first fateful meeting with canederli. When I came back home I saved all my pictures on my Mac and I promised myself that the 2013 folder would be overflowing with photos of new places, because I wanted this new year to be full of experiences ever done before, new friends and beauty to live, breathe and tell.

After ten days we were back in the car driving to Trentino. Our destination this time was Val di Fassa, Moena, Ciasa Alpina Hotel for the BloggerDay, a weekend to experience the Trentino Dream. Matteo and Sonia left their lives in Lombardy to follow a dream and make it real, they moved to Trentino to open the Ciasa Alpina Hotel.

You know me, I love the stories that begin with I have a dream… Sonia and Matteo, though, did not just realize the dream for themselves, because they make every day that dream available to everyone at Ciasa Alpina, thanks to their generosity and their emotional involvement in the life of the hotel. They give us the opportunity to live this dream of Trentino. This is one of the reasons behind the organization of an amazing weekend fully dedicated to bloggers, and that’s why it is also their fault if I fell in love with the mountains.

Mattia and Tommaso tried to prepare me: listen Juls, this place will take your breath away. Val di Fassa is really spectacular. Once you’ve tasted canederli there’s no coming back. Their efforts were vain, I had to see to believe.

I’ll try to tell you with words this experience, though most of the beautiful pictures are missing because I was too busy to admire in awe the landscape, or to pull myself out of the snow, to capture that moment. What follows is therefore only an emotional story, a few brush strokes to paint a weekend that worked perfectly, memories that I’ll cherish forever.

Reaching Val di Fassa. Every human being endowed with a pinch of sense of wonder can not help but be amazed when the mountains slowly open in a scenery I would expect in Canada, more than in Italy. Mind you, I would love to visit Canada. This was not enough, someone out there wanted it to be unforgettable. We arrived at dusk when the mountains were kissed by a pink sun, when the lights of the houses were slowly turning on, one after the the other. We arrived and Bryan Adams started singing from the radio Everything I do, from the soundtrack of Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. So is this the Val di Fassa… and it was love at first sight.

Sledging down. The first night we reached a rustic mountain hut with a snowmobile. Darkness and silence, the stars above us and the snow with an unreal and fairy gleam around us. Our voices were rising to be able to reach each other:  oh look! how wonderful! look at the stars! small splashes of snow were kissing us, pure and cold. We reached the hut and sipped a mug of hot spiced apple juice with cloves – my being almost entirely a-soft-drink-kind-of-girl shows also in freezing conditions, when a mulled wine would do nothing but good – and then came the most awaited and feared moment, going down with the sledge.

The stars are brighter in the mountains, they shine, they do not just stand there hanging in the sky. The silence is quieter when you ride a sledge down a slope, you just feel the snow crunching beneath you, then suddenly happy screams, lights, and you find yourself laughing out loud in a spin with friends, or completely lying in the snow.

Snowshoe hiking. I have great photos of the majestic landscape, I took them when I could stop without having someone else stumbling over me, but I miss all the best moments, I was too busy living them: a huge and happy dog that chased us for a while, running like a crazy in the snow. Or the sound of the snow under me, reliable and soft under my uncertain steps that gradually became more steady and confident.

Then I fall in, completely, and the more I laughed, the more I sank, I could not get up again. I am so grateful and relieved that there were no photographers around me to witness my grace, or my face when the snow slipped everywhere!

I thought I wouldn’t be able to enjoy completely my first experience in the mountains, held back by never having set foot on skis. I’ve never been more wrong. With the snowshoes you can reach that sense of communion with the immense that I was dying to try, you feel there in the middle of the snow-covered nature not as an intruder but as a tiny human being in front of the majestic landscape, you get lost in admiration and an involuntary smile rises on your face, and you cannot quench back. Now I am just waiting to be back in summer and fall in love again!

If you want to see other pictures of this unforgettable weekend have a look at Mattia, Tommaso, Elena and Cristiano‘s blogs. Eventually, a big thank you to Sonia and Matteo and Idea Turismo who gave me the chance to live the Trentino dream. I’ll be back next week with a recipe, I promise! I won’t skip to the travel blogging (even if, I must admit, it is so interesting and exciting!).