Mountains Retreats

Once we will have finally submitted each and every last frontier to progress, when even the last tribe and exotic species will have been hunted down and catalogued, where shall we find, after all this, wildness and the unknown? Once all the wonders of nature will have been scientifically examined, and every ancient monument will be an attraction for tourists, where shall we still find the sacred and the numinous? In a world rendered small by cars and telecommunications, where can we still experience immensity?

Freya Mathews
Ascent to Mount Civrari. Photo: Elena Ribet

Many a tradition has long cherished the mountains as a particularly propitious place for pilgrimage, healing rituals, as a place where to descent into ourselves, profoundly connecting with the cycle of life, death and rebirth in nature.

Morena Luciani Russo lives and performs mainly on the mountainsides of the Susa Valley in Piemonte, Italy. Her work is deeply focused upon sharing the experience and the poetry of these places. It is here that she organizes, every year, during the second week of July, days of intensely shared seminars, but she is also considering forthcoming events on other eminent Italian mountaintops.

The mountains are also her favorite setting for individual meetings.