Switzerland for me is like a stepmother. Growing up only 20km far from the border, made it the place where I regularly spent part of childhood with my family, mostly hiking and riding a mountain bike through Val Roseg or Val Fex, crossing the glacier of Diavolezza or snowboarding in Corvatsch in my teenage years. As an adult I started to appreciate other things of Switzerland, mostly the beautiful, scenic Engadina region or the fascinating towns of Bregaglia which became during the years the easy prey of hungry photographs, for the perfection of which they are made and for the stillness of their stone buildings. Those places were famous for hosting various artists/thinkers/philosophers that were either born or lived there for a while, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Alberto Giacometti, Giovanni Segantini.

I had the chance to visit Nietzsche house on a Sunday afternoon of January '24. It was a great sunny day and the sun was reflecting on the snowy valley and on the frozen surface of Silsersee and while we were looking at fishermen trying to get something out of the frozen pond, I depicted in my mind the famous philosopher walking around, trying to find an answer to unsolvable existential questions in the period when he was looking for places with good weather in order to improve his extreme bad health situation that finally led him to a mental burnout.

This year I went back to Switzerland, this time to walk along a short and easy path that took us through the towns of Stampa and Borgonovo in Bregaglia valley. These are the native places of Alberto Giacometti, a world-wide famous sculptor, who during his entire life tried to shape his own vision of the human figure, looking at people and trying to see through them and coming up with something fantastic, disproportionate and somehow grotesque. His creative rhythm was the same of those slow, almost empty valley, an eternal quest towards something that maybe barely exist, a doubtful answer that can't be answered.

Last but not least in this triptych comes Giovanni Segantini, a solitary man, an orphan (the mother/son relation is a recurring theme in his art) and an artist above all. Segantini was born in Tirol and lived his life between Brianza in Lombardy and Engadina, where he moved in search of solitude and mysticism, astonished by the beauty of the alpine nature. In Maloja, the city where he used to live, it is nowadays possible to walk the "Segantini way" and there is also a "Segantini museum" available in Saint Moritz.