Haven

After winding up through the beginnings of Gran Sasso National Park, the bus drops me off at a fork of a steep crumble of a road. From this point, everything is uphill and after a short walk I find the quaint B&B recommended by the L'aquila hotel I was staying at. The door is locked and there are two indifferent hounds at the front to greet me... at least they raised their heads from the sunny snooze they were deeply into. Italian dogs are quite autonomous. I go around to the side kitchen door where Rosa, the innkeeper and cook, lets me in. The rich aroma of her kitchen transports me to my grandmother's house. Rosa's sauce is simmering in the pot and wide strips of dough for the ravioli are laid flat on a countertop – already heaped with tablespoons of cheese spaced about 5 inches apart awaiting the folding and cutting process. Out her window, the mountain tops are dipped in grey-white billows. I am almost moved to tears by what seems too good to be true – to be standing in front of this magnificent woman with her broad, genuinely warm smile, who is making ravioli for me in paradiso. Surely, this must be an asylum for the insane and I am crazy. The first thing Rosa asks me is if I'm hungry and now there's no doubt I have chosen the right place and it already feels like home. But I'm anxious to drop off the luggage and go explore.

My room is dark but as I open the shuttered door light pours in and the vista unfolds with such force that I'm almost knocked off my feet. I am 3 stories up on the top of a mountainside steeply falling into a valley with squares of still green small farms. In the distance the higher Gran Sasso mountains scream upwards to 10,000 feet. My balcony faces west where the sky is now spotted blue but a storm is encroaching from the east. I hope there's thunder and lightning because that would just make this day even more surreal.

Back in the kitchen, I ask Rosa for a map. Throwing her dark hair back she laughs, “Map? What map? The village is tiny-tiny! There is no map!” I laugh at myself and set out to find the village center. Santo Stefano di Sessanio is a fortified – walled – village. There are no streets for motorized vehicles – only one or two that encircle the outer and inner walls. There are no streets within the village, only a maize of steeply stepped and ramped stone walkways that snake through stone archways and narrow, sometimes dark, vaulted corridors that will suddenly turn and burst into sunlit grottos or potted gardens. It's off season here and the flurry of tourists have gone back to mostly Italian cities, so the walks are practically deserted but for a few locals. The village has recently gained notoriety as an historic destination. Everywhere there is restoration going on – plasters, painters, carpenters and stone masons working on buildings that had been abandoned for a century up until 50 years ago. Because Santo Stefano was so completely abandoned its historicity remained intact, although in decay. So there is a new pride as people move into the tiny paese, repopulating it and restoring it. Unfortunately for the few locals that have remained or returned, and like Crested Butte, Santo Stefano has been discovered and with that the real estate has recently exploded with foreign money and investors making a fortune marketing to non nationals and the new tourism. However, unlike Crested Butte, the taxes probably won't increase for the real locals.

When I return, there's a briskness in the late afternoon air and now I'm hungry. Rosa and Roberto are eating their lunch at the family table in the kitchen and invite me to eat with them. I'm overjoyed since it's the real thing... lunch with an Italian family, much like my own. While Rosa watches a slideshow on my computer of the 200 photos I took of her village, I delightfully lose myself in a plate of her ravioli and a glass of red wine.

In the north, the alpenglow rises up the Gran Sasso and shafts of light comb the southwest range. As the clouds move I catch glimpses of taller mountains further away. The viewscape changes constantly as clouds roll across the face of the mountains, opening up a different scene every moment. Everywhere is the sweetly pungent smell of wood stove fires. Old men's songs echo off the hillside while masons' trowels scrape new life across the ancient walls, dogs bark, birds chatter jubilantly, crows are cackling in a distinctive local dialect, somewhere chickens are happily clucking and in the very distant past, I think I can hear the bells of the sheepherder's flock coming down the mountain trail.