The black letters painted on the walls – announcing the “hostelry” and the “bar” – are fading to nothing. Both have been closed for decades. There’s no building work going on either: in one garden a cement mixer has been rotated upwards, painted yellow and turned into a plant pot. Many of the houses are empty and have hand-written For Sale signs on their front doors.
This is Massiola, a mountain village 772 metres above sea level, west of Lake Maggiore in the northern Italian region of Piedmont.
