Levice | Back to Nature

I recently found myself in one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places on earth. Scouting around with people who’ve now become friends (Elisa, Mauro and the other guys who were part of our troupe), my photographer John and I set out to discover the Alta Langa, sometimes translated as Upper Langa. In Piedmont dialect langa means tongue, and in this case a long strip of land between two valleys. The Alta Langa is the road less travelled, but the cons of getting to this marginal frontier area turn into pros when you find yourself among time-forgotten hills and really begin to detox. At this altitude there are fewer of the vineyards that distinguish the Lower Langa, but they do have a bit of a reputation for hazelnuts. There are 43 stone-built villages clinging to the hilltops, some with barely 200 inhabitants. But I was struck by the number of foreigners I met along the way, people who’d chosen to ditch the urban lifestyle and live on the edge right here. Among them were Verena and Mario Schlatter-Weltert and their kids.

They moved from Switzerland when Nora, their first born, was just a few weeks old and set out to restore their new home. Brick by brick. Five years on, the family is practically self-sustaining. They grow their own vegetables, raise sheep and make their own cheeses, keep hens, a couple of donkeys too, and Mario manages to run a carpentry workshop. They’re happy in an ever-after sort of way they wouldn’t change for the world with no TV, no WiFi, no i-anything (and Mikaela comes along and feels like some kind of techno-junkie dependent on a four-bar connection at all times). The homestead near Levice includes the family dwelling and two beautifully decked out farm-holiday apartments, one in a tiny old stone barn originally used for drying chestnuts. I’ve booked for this summer, to take my kids back to nature for a while, show them it’s still possible to live without all that tech and gadgetry…