The house at the foot of the mountain
I landed in Milan on the morning of July 4th, picked up a rental car, and drove with Diego through the slow green of northern Italy. We stopped at Valeggio sul Mincio to wander around the old castle, then kept heading northeast until the road started bending upward and the Dolomites showed themselves: pale, serrated, a kind of stone that doesn’t look quite real the first time you see it.
Our first stop was Selva di Cadore, where Diego’s friend Andrea has a family house his parents keep as a summer place. It sits at the foot of a mountain, the kind of location where you step outside in the morning and the view is already doing most of the work for you. Green pasture, grey peaks, sky. You eat breakfast at a long table outside, and nobody really talks for the first few minutes because it would feel rude.
That first morning, over coffee and bread, Andrea’s father asked me about my name. Lei. I told him it’s written 磊 — three copies of 石, the character for stone, stacked one on two. Put three stones together like that and they can’t fall over. The character means integrity, in the sense of being solid, hard to knock down.
I got out a pen and drew a few more for them. 木 is a tree. Put two together and you get 林, a grove. Three, 森, and now it’s a dense forest. Or: 人 is a person, standing there with two legs. 从 is one person following another. 众 is a crowd. Add a single horizontal stroke at the base of 木 and it becomes 本 — the root, the foundation, the origin of the thing. Andrea’s father thought for a moment and then said: Your name in Italian is Pietro. Stone.
Later that day we climbed a mountain — one of the trails winding up from San Vito di Cadore — and at the top there was a summit book, the kind hikers sign when they make it up. Andrea took the pen and, very carefully, drew 磊 next to his name. Three stones, stacked properly. He got it right.
We had dinner back at the house. Andrea’s parents, it turned out, had been helping bring children out of Gaza to Italy for medical treatment. We talked for a long time — about that, about China, about what had been happening with technology and green energy back home. I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since.
One thing that keeps coming back to me is the agency of people here. Europeans, in my experience, are genuinely active. They show up, they organize, they march. There’s a moral seriousness about the world that I admire. But the approach is individualistic, and it often doesn’t translate into results. China has the opposite problem, or maybe the opposite arrangement: there isn’t the same culture of street-level activism, but the state is extraordinarily effective at actually building the things European progressives say they want — the clean energy, the infrastructure, a foreign policy that doesn’t bomb anyone. Europe, meanwhile, takes pride in its democracy, but when a million people pour into the streets for Gaza, the governments — and I’m looking at Germany in particular, where I was living — simply don’t move. Somewhere between will and outcome, something has broken.
Anyway. That was only day one.
Rain, cheese, and the Gringos
The next day we hiked in Val di Zoldo and climbed up to Rifugio Coldai for lunch. Rifugios, if you’ve never been, are mountain huts that serve food and rent you a bed. Some are spartan, some are almost nice hotels with wine lists. Coldai was somewhere in between — hot coffee, pasta, a terrace looking out at a lake you’d want to photograph badly and fail to capture.
There was an American couple sitting next to us. Diego and I were discussing whether we should head down soon because the forecast said it was about to rain. The man turned to us and asked, with what I can only describe as gentle amusement:
“And you believe the forecast?”
Diego’s face did something complicated. He has a word for a certain type of American tourist — gringos — and I watched the word assemble itself silently behind his eyes. We paid and left.
The forecast was right. We hiked down in a pouring, cold, miserable rain, and by the time we reached the valley we were soaked through and shivering. We found a small restaurant at the foot of the trail and ordered hot chocolate, the thick Italian kind you could almost eat with a spoon. The owner asked where in China I was from. I said Wuhan — figuring he probably wouldn’t know Hubei — and he smiled knowingly. Covid had made Wuhan internationally famous, although not in the way we might have chosen. I told him Wuhan was now also known for its self-driving taxis. He laughed. We bought some local cheese there and returned home.
Into the Brenta
On July 7th we said goodbye to Andrea’s family and drove west to Pinzolo, in Trentino, where we parked the car at Parcheggio Vallesinella — the trailhead for the Brenta Dolomites. We wouldn’t see the car again for five days.
The Brenta is its own small universe within the Dolomites: a tight cluster of pale limestone towers and spires, cut by small glaciers and laced together by one of the most famous via ferrata systems in the world — the Via delle Bocchette. A via ferrata, for the uninitiated, is an “iron way”: a route up or across a mountain that would otherwise require technical climbing, but which has been equipped with a steel cable bolted into the rock, plus ladders, rungs, and pegs where needed. You wear a harness with two lanyards clipped to the cable. If you slip, the cable catches you. If you’ve never done one before, the first hour is terrifying and the second hour is euphoric.
We hiked up to Rifugio Tuckett e Sella and had dinner there — a 1906 hut with blue-striped shutters, sitting at 2,272 meters in front of a rock face that looks vertical until you realize it actually is. That was our first night.
The next morning we climbed from Tuckett toward Rifugio Stoppani (also called Graffer), moving gradually above the snow line. This was the day the landscape changed character. At the rifugio, we stepped out and the whole world opened up: snow under our boots, then a vast green expanse of lower mountains, then clouds drifting below us, not above. You don’t see clouds from above very often unless you’re on a plane, and from a plane it doesn’t really count.
I told Diego a line of classical Chinese I’ve always loved, written by the calligrapher Wang Xizhi in the year 353, at a gathering in a pavilion by a river:
仰观宇宙之大，俯察品类之盛，所以游目骋怀，足以极视听之娱，信可乐也。
Roughly: Looking up, I see the immensity of the cosmos; bowing my head, I see the multitude of the world. The gaze flies, the heart expands, the joy of the senses reaches its peak — this, truly, is happiness.
In 2022, when the Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti passed over Beijing on the International Space Station, this was the line she tweeted. I told Diego that, standing there above the clouds, and we were both quiet for a while.
The hard day
July 9th was the day the via ferrata began in earnest: Stoppani to Rifugio Alimonta, via the Bocchette Alte. This is the long one — about five and a half kilometers on paper, which sounds like nothing, until you learn it’s a thousand meters of vertical gain spread across steep iron ladders, exposed ledges, and a glacier crossing where crampons aren’t a bad idea.
I’d done via ferrata before, at Yandangshan in China. But that had been a tourist version — well-groomed, busy, theme-parkish. This was something else. You’re clipped to a cable on the edge of a mountain with snow glittering a few hundred meters below your boots, and the only thing between you and a long fall is a steel line and your own attention. It is, I discovered, one of the more honest things a person can do with an afternoon.
Somewhere along Bocchette Alte, a Polish guy overtook us, moving fast. He had no harness. No lanyards. Nothing. Just a pair of gloves and what appeared to be a complete absence of the survival instinct. He smiled at us, said something cheerful in Polish-accented English, and was gone around a corner. Diego and I agreed that that guy was crazy.
By the time we dragged ourselves onto the terrace at Alimonta, I was done. Empty. That particular, specific fatigue you get when you’ve been paying close attention to every single step for eight hours.
Agostini, and the German at the bar
The next day, July 10th, my Garmin watch — a device I normally trust about as far as I can throw it — was blinking that my “body battery” was critically low and I needed rest. We needed to keep going. The route to Rifugio Agostini was another long day of mostly via ferrata: the Bocchette Centrali, then the Brentari, threading past the narrow spire of the Campanile Basso and across small glacial basins.
At Agostini that evening, I ended up in conversation with a German guy at the bar. He asked where I was from. When I said China, he nodded and then, after a careful pause, asked me about Muslim life there.
I told him that Islam in China is old — much older than most Europeans realize. The Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou is considered one of the oldest mosques anywhere in the world, traditionally dated to the 7th century.
He said, still carefully: “But China is so good at propaganda. How do you know what you’re telling me is true?”
I told him I’d been to Guangzhou. I’d stood in that courtyard. I’d seen it with my own eyes.
It wasn’t a hostile conversation — he was genuine, and so was I. But there’s a particular kind of quiet satisfaction in being able to answer a question like that with I was there. Diego and I, when we first met in Berlin, had bonded over exactly this sort of thing — a shared exhaustion with how close-minded some Europeans can be. Having the conversation at a high-altitude hut, in Italy, with a German stranger, felt like a small completion of a circle.
The way down
July 11th was the way out: a steep via ferrata climb up and over a final ridge, then a long descent back toward Vallesinella. The first section went nearly straight up — iron rungs hammered into a wall you’d call vertical if you were being diplomatic. My legs, at this point, had stopped negotiating with me. They were just doing what I asked and logging a complaint for later.
We had lunch by a waterfall at Rifugio Cascate di Mezzo, the kind of place where you sit down in wet socks and feel ten years younger. Then down to the car, still parked faithfully where we’d left it, and back to Milan.
Cooperativa La Liberazione
Andrea had recommended a restaurant in Milan. It was called Cooperativa La Liberazione.
Looking at the name, I translated it in my head on instinct: 解放合作社 — “Liberation Cooperative.” It would not be out of place as the name of a state-run work unit in 1960s China.
Walking in was surreal. It was a leftist-themed restaurant in a way that Europeans do and Americans mostly can’t: not ironic, not a gimmick, but a kind of living museum of the 20th-century European left. A bust of Mao on one shelf. A framed slogan from German antifa — Kein Wein den Faschisten. — no wine for fascists. A portrait of Antonio Gramsci. A Cuban flag. Pamphlets. Photographs.
Diego and I ordered wine and sat with it for a while. It was one of the strangest and most moving places I’ve ever eaten a plate of pasta.
I said to him something like: it’s beautiful that this tradition is still alive here, but it feels more like a memorial than a movement. The communist current in Europe has run down to a trickle. Economically and ideologically, the continent is inside the American orbit. Revolution here, in any real sense, is no longer on the table. Whatever’s left of that lineage — the actual practical attempt to build a different kind of society — has moved east.
We were having this conversation during what was, at the time, a pretty dramatic moment in the U.S.–China trade confrontation, with China not at all in the posture of a country losing. That gave the evening a particular flavor. The restaurant felt like a shrine to a possibility that Europe had once almost reached for, and then let go.
We ate. We walked back through Milan in the warm night. The next morning we flew back to Berlin.