Mt Bisalta, alta due volte. A few stories.
If you are ever in the south of Piedmont it’s quite likely that you’ll see Mt Bisalta in the landscape, with her iconic shape and two peaks (her name means twice tall, bis-alta).
Mt Bisalta (or Besimauda) belongs to the Ligurian Alps and stands at 2.231 and 2403 m quite isolated from other mountains, offering a beautiful 360 panorama with the Ligurian sea often visible in clear days.
The top is bare and rocky, with massive porphyritic boulders scattered around, while at her feet there are chestnut woods, with some birches and pines, growing on soft clay soil.
I’ve foraged several types of clay on the slopes of the mountain in the past few years, and recently also built a wood kiln, partly made with local earth. It has become a very important place for me, geologically and emotionally, and also for Etna and Nyiragonga the cats, who love hiking in the woods.
There are many legends and fascinating stories surrounding the mountain. The one telling the tale between the -toxic- King Vesulo and Queen Besimauda, who were transformed into rocks as Monviso and Bisalta, allegedly has her roots in the beliefs of Neolithic populations of the area.
The Liguri moved to the area to hunt in the summer, later followed by the Celts. They identified the particular shape of the mountain as a symbol of feminine energy, opposed to the symbolic male mountain Monviso who is just in front. They considered the valley of Bisalta a magical one, rich in propitious natural forces, in which to settle and hunt. Near the top of the mountain there are a menhir, a few engravings in the rocks and an interesting anthropomorphic statue with triangular head, probably objects of worship among the Liguri (Mottini, Memorie Storiche di Boves, 1986).
Another legend tells the story of why the mountain has two tops. A drunk man walking home was particularly annoyed with the Bisalta overshadowing his path from moonlight. He asked the intervention of the devil to remove the mountain, promising to sell his soul to him if he could do it by the end of the night. A legion of demons started to pickaxe the mountain top engulfed by sulphurous clouds only to realise, when half work was done, that the man tricked the devil by signing the contract with a cross. All the demons vanished leaving the work half done, with the mountain top split in two and big boulders tolled down the slope.
The vertical rocky streaks along the slopes, visible from the bottom, also gave space to the imagination. They are called “vie du serpant” (roads of the snake) and it is said that among the big irregular boulders balanced on the cliffs of Mt Bisalta lives a gigantic snake, who changes appearance and is responsible for landslides, avalanches and “weird smells” in the summer (Sito Valli Marittime Occitane).
This mountain was once much more populated and there was an old Via del Sale that crossed her flanks, meaning a lot of people passing. While building the kiln we dug several wheel barrels of earth and found many shards of old ceramic ware, a 1 cent copper coin from 1821 and a few bullets shells. Near the place where we keep finding ceramic shards there was apparently a clay pit somewhere, as one of the neighbours recalls that during his childhood his relatives were moving earth up and down the hill with bulls and then using it to make bricks.
In recent history, during Second World War, the mountain was an important site of resistance against nazi-fascism. It’s here that the first legion of partisans started to organise themselves lead by Ignazio Vian and it’s in Boves, the village just below, that the nazis committed one of the first massacres in Italy just days after the surrender, burning the village and its people. The partisans on Mt Bisalta had a crucial role in liberating Italy from the Nazis and paid a high price, the rule “ten Italians for one German” was tested in Boves, also after the end of the war. Much of this history of the resistance on the mountain was illustrated by Adriana Filippi, painter and partisan herself, with sketches and paintings that you can now see in the Museum Adriana Filippi in Boves (Barbero, Adriana Filippi, la pittrice partigiana che documentò la resistenza con cavalletto e pennello).
Another neighbour recollects when, after the end of the war, in the 70s, a portion of the mountain was used for military bombing training by the Italian Army, and how when they were children one of his cousins found an unexploded bomb while playing.
On the other side of the mountain, the presence of uranium at a few hundreds meters of depth adds yet another story to the complexity of this place. In Val Fredda, on the opposite side of the mountain compared to where we built the kiln, in the 50s they found traces of radioactivity and, after a visit and study of the samples from Marie Curie, Montedison employed local workers to mine uranium at around 400-500 meters of depth. The first tunnel was dug by hand and the extraction method initially included only pneumatic drills, used dry. Later more workers had to be hired, and a group of them from Marche, which had an union behind, obliged Montedison to introduce tools to wet the rock and minimise dust in the tunnels’ air. The mine was closed in the 60s as Montedison realised the material was too scarce and of difficult access. Several of the workers of the mine were killed by the effects of poor safety and labour conditions in the following years (Riccomagno, «Quando a Peveragno c’era la miniera per estrarre uranio»).
Today the three tunnels of the mine are completely flooded and two of the entrances have collapsed. At the remaining entry one of the ex workers of the mine left a plaque to remember his colleagues:
“1949 - 1962
Here uranium was mined,
here many men left their health.
Andrea Castellino,
one of them”.
On the opposite side of torrente Colla there’s another story that is also talking about power imbalances and class war. Immersed in the woods and quite hidden if you don’t know where it is, there’s a rock engraved in 1796 that says: “Tremblez tirants” (May tyrants tremble). It is unsure who wrote it, but it is likely that it was written by locals rebelling against the violence and greed of nobility and clergy, on the wake of the neighbouring French revolution (Peirone, Storia popolare di Boves, 1956).
Romano, one of the neighbours who knows deeply the mountain, recently explained us that the chestnuts were initially imported and planted for cultivation, yet now there are also some wild chestnut trees among them, which you can recognise from their planted parents from the bark. The woods now range from incredibly well kept chestnut fields, with a burnt floor, clean and tidy to collect chestnuts each year, and denser messier forests that were abandoned by people and have now different species of trees.
It’s common to find traces of boars, deers eating at the bark and we even saw a wolf during winter.
It’s a good mountain for mushrooms, beyond chestnuts, but we rarely find porcini in groups, they come up alone and isolated, or we are not very good at finding them. Last year though there were entire fields covered with parasol mushrooms.
Clays and rocks
The presence of chestnuts, birches and boars, is an initial indicator of what to me is “good earth”, for what I need in pottery. The mountain has volcanic origin, and is made of effusive acidic igneous rocks, today more or less metamorphosized or weathered.
The lower part of the mountain is predominantly clay, mixed with pebbles and fragments of different rocks, all covered by a thick layer of organic soil, with no presence of limestone. She counterbalances with refractoriness what she lacks in plasticity.
Above that there are different layers of rocks, which all have a common effusive origin, but currently present themselves with a very different appearance depending on the intensity of the metamorphism. The top of the mountain is made up of quartz porphyries, followed a bit below by Besimauditi, laminated and schistose porphyroids, green in colour, and then light, white, green and yellow schists formed from porphyry, tuff and rhyolite, soft and crumbly (Vittone, Cenni geologici sul M. Besimauda e sulla mineralizzazione uranifera di. Rio Freddo, 1980).
Every place on Earth has interesting materials and materials that can be used by a potter, from urban areas to farmlands and seashores, but when it comes to refractory clay, to build a high fire kiln or pots that can sustain stoneware temperatures, then the locations that can provide that become much less frequent. You can’t make a high temperature kiln with low fire terracotta, you can’t make raku with calcareous clay from a river, or a clay body if you only have sand. You can use anything you find in your surroundings, but you have to adapt to it, as the other way around just won’t happen. Or you need to look at specific places for specific things.
The feet of this mountain are, from a material point of view, a really great location to make stoneware pottery and build a wood kiln, and part of the choice on why we decided to build one here.
Looking at the granulometry, the soil is mostly clay, which is good to dig the vertical and compact walls of the kiln, but also has a good amount of silt and sand that makes it less prone to drastic reduction of volume and cracking when fired. Because of the acidic nature of the mountain the clay is also rich in silica and can sustain temperatures of 1250-1270C. It can also go a little above that without any signs of melting, but its density starts to decrease which is not good for a kiln and its structural walls.
I started collecting clays here in 2020, cataloging them across different locations, although most of them don’t present that many differences from one another. There are basically two types of clays you can find, one that is of sedimentary origin, dark, rich in quartz and iron oxides, and one that is kaolinitic and formed in situ from the degradation of rhyolites, tuffs and porphyritic schists. The first is abundant and forms the soil that covers all of the bottom part of the mountain. The second happens in small veins and pockets.
The biggest obstacle of these clays for making pottery is their lack of plasticity. Resting the clay for just a few months drastically improves the situation. Ball milling part of it too, although as it’s often the case with ball-milling clay bodies, their temperature range decreases a bit too.
The other solution, which I am adopting more lately, is to just add a small percentage of bentonite. I’ve foraged bentonite in Veneto, Sardegna and Slovenia and they all work well in just small proportions to adjust plasticity.
Foraging this local dark clay in different places means accessing the small exceptional pockets that have better plasticity or fewer rocks in them and different types of rocks as inclusion in the clay body. I think that foraging “well”, like being able to see the perhaps very small puddle that has a smaller granulometry, is the biggest advantage you can give yourself while working with wild clays.
Most of the differences across these Mt Bisalta samples is given by how well water has naturally sieved and sedimented the clay for us and the nature of the rock chunks naturally present in the clay.
For the kaolins, there are pockets dispersed around ranging from small to minuscule, and one big exposed vein at the bottom, at around half an hour walk to get there. Each of these has quite a different behaviour while firing but very similar qualities, smell, texture and colour when foraged.
The kaolins need even more processing than the local dark clay, and for every bucket foraged there’s less than a quarter bucket of fine-grained material.
They are among my favourite materials to work with, and fire.
Plans for the future involve foraging more of these kaolins at the bottom of the mountain and perhaps bringing Etna and Nyiragonga hiking to the peak, on a two or three days walk. So far, they have walked up until Cima Croce at 1270 m. Just 1000 m more to go.
