Giaveno

Milk. Raw milk, to be more specific — not only fresh, having been just recently extracted, but also not processed in any way to increase its longevity, such as pasteurizing (that is, boiling to eliminate any potentially harmful organisms). It is the closest you can get to milk straight out of a cow. For a long time I had been searching for it: I had managed to find a few distributors of fresh whole milk, which is already incomparably better not only in terms of taste, but especially of nutritional value (this is one of the reasons for my weekly peregrination to the nearby town of Settimo Torinese). But raw milk is very difficult to find.

What is not difficult is to see why: our lives are ever more sanitized and distanced from reality, and modern institutions, from medicine to politics and education, view people as helpless infants who have to be taken care of by an obsessively dominant mother, who cannot be trusted to take care of their own lives, health, or nutrition (and who, of course, then go on to become just that). This is the society which makes “healthcare” “free” (very heavy quotes) but raw milk illegal (some places have gone that far).

But my search was finally over when I found Società Agricola Versino, which for more than twenty years has had an automatic milk distributor right in front of their shop in the small town of Giaveno where you can get raw milk. It costs €1/L (for reference, about half the price of organic milk at the supermarket), and goes straight into your glass bottle, so that there is no waste and it never even touches plastic, yet another grave problem with almost every conventional product these days.

So, naturally, there was only one thing to do: take my bicycle and go there. Giaveno is about 36km from where I live, at the margin of a region known as the anfiteatro morenico di Rivoli-Avigliana, a large rock formation (about 50km²) caused by a colossal glacier which once covered the valley of the Dora Riparia river. The path from Torino to Rivoli, at the foot of the mountains, follows the largest straight street in Europe, corso Francia (read about it in the previous post). From there, it crosses the dense forest of collina morenica di Rivoli into the stunning region of the lakes of Avigliana, with the snowy Alps always visible in the distance and, of course, plenty of farms and cows, goats, sheep, etc. grazing on the green mountain slopes.

From the few hours I spent in Giaveno itself (this was tight a day trip), I can say it is a beautiful small town (just above 15 thousand inhabitants) and very old: the name is said to derive from Latin iam veni, “I have arrived”, pronounced by Hannibal after his crossing of the Alps (again, read all about it in the previous post). In my short walk around the city center, I especially liked the very typical atmosphere of the Italian countryside, the small cafés, and the beautiful Torre degli orologi and the XII century Chiesa di San Lorenzo martire.

The way back, which thank God was mostly a descent, as I had no legs after having gone up more than 1000m, had as background the lakes of Avigliana and the Dora Riparia, which flows down all the way to Torino, where it joins with the Po, with the entire Val di Susa painted by the deep blue and orange colors of dusk.

Alium multis gloria terris
tradat et omnes fama per urbes
garrula laudet
caeloque parem tollat et astris;
alius curru sublimis eat:
me mea tellus
lare secreto tutoque tegat.

Let glory laud another to many lands,
and let babbling fame sing his praise
through every city and lift him to a level
with the stars of heaven;
let another fare towering in his car;
but me let my own land, beside my lonely,
sheltered hearth, protect.