Fall in the Italian Alps is Majestical to steal a word from our time living in New Zealand, where it is currently spring! The combination of high alpine villages bathed in the Mediterranean sun is the perfect setting for long days of exploration. It seems impossible that sunbathing at 10,000 feet would be pleasurable but that is the thing about autumn in the Alps, what is possible expands with each labored breath.
We came to Cervinia to get ready for winter and we ended up falling for autumn’s enchantments. Here are a few of our favorite fall quotes with some images from the last month. It is hard to find words to capture the kind of beauty that leaves us breathless and feeling small in all the right ways.
I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. – L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. – Henry David Thoreau
I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. – Nathaniel Hawthorne
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face. – John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose
I want to close with these words by David Whyte from Winter Apple:
Let the apple rippen on the branch beyond your need to take it down Let the coolness of autumn and the breathing, blowing wind test its adherence to endurance, let the others fall. Wait longer than you would go against yourself, find the pale nobility of quiet that ripening demands
What wonders are you witnessing this season? No matter what corner of the earth you inhabit, may we all find the “pale nobility of quiet that ripening demands.”
