11. Of wolves, eagles, and seasons

There is a wolf that guides the people of Bergamo. This is what we learn from the inscription on the front of the former oratory in Via San Tomaso. DIVO LUPO BERGOMATUM DUCI. “Divine Wolf, leader of the Bergamasques.” For those of us who have reread Aldo Leopold, it is a kind of epiphany. In the passage “Thinking Like a Mountain,” to be found in A Sand County Almanac, the American forest ranger reflects on the moment when, as a young man, he killed a she-wolf and saw “a green fire dying in her eyes.”

Lorenzo Giusti