I grew up here, I learned love and respect for the mountains from my parents. We really want to devote our lives to re-valuing them and conveying a message: that the mountains can be experienced, not just talked about. ROSBettola is a sort of revenge we are taking, because when my parents moved here, at an altitude of one thousand metres, when there wasn’t even a road to drive on, someone called them hermits or hippies. What we have done can be done by others. It is a hope for the future”

Edith Gastinelli

Leo is in the kitchen, Edith is tapping beer behind the bar counter, dad Sandro is talking about cheese, and mum Marzia is taking orders. The Gastinelli family’s enterprise is not simply a tavern «ROSBettola», (bettola in Italian is a derogative term for a pub, meaning “a hole”, Translator’s note), opened in September 2020 at 1,000 metres above sea level – but a real mission: to make everyone understand that returning to live in Rosbella, a hamlet in the Boves, area, is not only possible, but great.

Piazza Tancredi Galimberti, in the historical centre of the town of Cuneo, is less than twelve kilometres away, yet in 2000 – when Sandro and Marzia moved up here with little Edith, who was four years old at the time, there was only one inhabitant left in the entire village, Pinu Montagna. Pinu Montagna. “The message we want to put across is that one needs to be able to re-invent themselves in order to live in the mountains, reinterpreting our ancestors’ versatility in a 21st century key and applying it to new sectors and new jobs. One hundred years ago, no one would have imagined an audio-visual production studio in the mountains, yet my parents brought it there, in 2008, when the ROSBed&breakfast, was also opened, after many years of neglect. In 2001, my brother Leo was the first child to be born in Rosbella after two generations. Today, there are 14 of us living here, with three permanent households” says Edith. A century ago, Rosbella had 250 inhabitants. Thirty of them were children, there was a teacher all year round and a tavern, “on the ground floor of what is now our house, where we opened the B&B”, says Sandro.