Irene Borgna

Irene Borgna (1984) is a writer, anthropologist, excursion guide and marathon runner. In Il pastore di Stambecchi (The Ibex Shepherd, Ponte alle Grazie, 2018), she collected Louis Oreiller’s testimony, respecting his extraordinary gift as a narrator and his archaic language. With Cieli neri she won the Mario Rigoni-Stern Prize.

Cieli neri

(Black Skies – A Journey in Search of the Stolen Night)

Ponte alle Grazie, February 2021

Two travellers, a camper van, Europe at its darkest: a crossing from the Maritime Alps to the North Sea in search of what’s left of the night on the continent most affected by artificial light pollution.

Winner Mario Rigoni Stern Prize

We can all understand what the word “night” means, even if we might never have experienced it. The night, when nothing is lit and the stars have the power to pierce through the black quilt of the sky. Those who live in the Western world, particularly in large cities, have seldom been immersed in a true night. Electricity, a great invention that has opened the gates to thousands of new experiences, has inexorably absorbed all the darkness, preventing us from experiencing the other side of daytime, with all its gifts: stars, the Milky Way, the sleep/waking rhythm and the poetry of the darkness.

Irene Borgna went in search of places that are untouched by light pollution in order to reclaim the night, discover what polluting it means, then tell us about the economic, anthropological, social, poetic and symbolic aspects of light pollution.

Il pastore di stambecchi

(The Ibex Shepherd)

Ponte alle Grazie, May 2018

2 editions in 10 days

Louis has spent all 84 years of his life listening to the mountains. His intense life, always lived at high altitude, is a collection of incredible experiences and enchanting stories.

For Louis Oreiller, mountains are neither a challenge nor a feat. They are his home of earth and sky, a horizon to which he belongs. Louis was born to poverty and grew up in the war. Originally from the Aosta Valley, he has spent his 84 years in Rhêmes-Notre-Dame – just twenty chimney tops at 1,7000 metres’ altitude, deep in the beautiful wilderness of a narrow valley.
As a boy with no other weapon but hunger, he is hunter, smuggler, labourer. His outlook changes when he becomes a gamekeeper. During his long, solitary days staking out poachers from behind the lenses of his monocular, he becomes the lord of the ledges, observes eagles flying and experiences something very similar to love. Season after season, he transforms trees into sculptures, “digs out” badgers and marmots, and speaks to dogs, cows and hens – to humans, too, sometimes.
Oreiller’s world is one that is now lost, trampled by a modernity without patience, by a stream of people who come back but never stay. And yet his eyes, his gnarled, powerful hands and his words, entrusted to those who, like anthropologist Irene Borgna, are able to hear them, can lead you far away, off the trail, to hidden passes – marking time, like the rings of a tree, like the rings on the antlers of an old ibex.

Rights Sold

France: Glénat.

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