Marta's Monterosa Blog

Ahh, after a good nights sleep (for everyone except Pascal) in the cabin of the ferry, we are finally in Germany.

But our happiness doesn't last very long, after just a few kilometers we were met by a long line.

We were stuck in this first line for at least 40 minutes and after the first one there was the next one. Of course after that one, an other and so on.

So our view for today was pretty much like this…

I have seen pretty many hotels in my days as a travel consultant, especially hotels in the Alps.

But Hotel Bellvue, in the village of Cogne is the most beautiful I have ever seen. How comes?

Beauty is not a superficial identity of something, it is the soul of this something emanating on the outside. It could be that the soul is always beautiful, so something beautiful has a soul. A human being can hide her soul, and so can things owned by human beings, behind a surface. Many people and things seem to be beautiful on the surface, but they end beeing fake reproductions or products of plastic surgery, when you look a little closer.

says Maura Susanna, to introduce herself.

We sit in the dining room at La Torretta hotel, and sip a drink after a long day spent hiking in the special landscape of the mountains in fall. A little tired but also very relaxed; walking in the fog and woods, through the ancient villages of the Monterosa, is for me as good as honey. Today it is my birthday.

Paola and Nica are the spiritual and also very physical power behind hotel La Torretta in the Aosta Valley, and a lot more. They have restored Paola’s family possession into a beautiful house for resting your mind and your body, and they have funded a local organisation of hotel owners in the Aosta Valley, where the focus is on ”Slow”. Or as they declare in their programme: ” the most important thing is to stop in order to know places, spaces, silences, perfume, colours…” http://www.slowholiday.it/index.php/filosofia-eng.html

Except for the name of the club, ”Slow Holiday”, the ladies are really sparkling, and filled of energy and fresh enthusiasm. Probably a consequence of the application of this philosophy.

This is again coherent with some of the ideas behind the ”genuine tourism” that I am working for today. Thus La Torretta http://www.latorrettahotel.com/ is the hotel where I invite my guests during this October tour.

I was a little bit nervous because I had a group of guests from Sweden for three days, and I was going to proof that autumn in the Alps is a perfect time for tourism. But, would they really enjoy my beloved valleys and mountains as I hoped?

Well, if nothing else, at least the spectacle of the mountains with the colours of fall and the crazy blue sky, would be enough to highten their spirits, unless…

Unless…

the weather is thick with fog, and we do not even see a hint of the 4000m peaks that only I know are around us, behind the white courtains!