The writer Davide Lajolo was born to a peasant family in Vinchio on 29 July 1912, 'in the season of the golden wheat'. He would always remain attached to his village. Vinchio and its inhabitants would figure as the protagonists of his stories. Lajolo studied the classics at Salesian colleges, but his rebellious character got him expelled and he spent his last year of education at Plana college in Alessandria.
In his youth he embraced the Fascist ideology, which he was later to abandon on 8 September 1943, when he took the momentous decision to become a turncoat and coordinate partisan guerilla warfare in his native hills. He assumed the battle name of ‘Ulysses’ and became chief of staff of the VIII and IX Garibaldi Division in Basso Monferrato.
After the war Lajolo began writing intensively. A friend of Beppe Fenoglio and Cesare Pavese – whose biography he published in 1960 – he was also a politically active journalist.
Among his many works, I Mè - Racconto senza fine tra Langa e Monferrato (My Places: A Never-Ending Story in Langhe and Monferrato) stands out. It is a captivating literary portrait of early-20th-century peasant culture in Piedmont.
Start in Vinchio, in front of the village hall in Piazza San Marco. Before heading off, we recommend visiting the multi-media exhibition named ‘Vinchio è il mio nido’, dedicated to Davide Lajolo, housed in a public room on Via Capitano Ettore Lajolo. Start by going to the village cemetery, where you'll find the writer's tomb. Go on to the junction and follow the signs for the village of Noche, along Strada i Bricchi del Barbera, where you'll find the open-air peasant museum, with signs. Carry on to Castelnuovo Calcea, the birthplace of another Piedmontese writer and poet, Angelo Brofferio, from the 19th century. He also remembers life in his native countryside in his moving biography I miei tempi (My Times). Here you can admire the ruins of the medieval castle and the splendid church of Santo Stefano.
The route continues in the direction of Nizza Monferrato. Turn right after the little chapel of San Rocco and go along pretty little roads through the vineyards of Barbera d'Asti. These will bring you to Nizza Monferrato, where you can see paintings from the Lajolo collection in the ‘Umberto Eco’ public library. After the town, carry on to Vaglio Serra. On the way from here to Vinchio, you'll find the famous Cantina Cooperativa di Vinchio-Vaglio Serra. Here they've come up with a route called 'I nidi' (the nests), which runs along the path over the hill above to the edge of the Val Sarmassa nature reserve. It's a homage to the writer, scholar and politician Davide Lajolo, who referred to the village he was born in as 'my nest'. And among the vineyards you will indeed find nest-like structures, often used for tastings and reading excerpts from the writer's works. The way back to Vinchio is along the SP 40 for 20 km if you're on a road bike.
If your bike can go along dirt roads and trails though, you can go right at the junction and follow the sign for 'Percorsi Letterari', towards Belveglio. The route now comes out into what Lajolo called the 'green sea', winding through the farms of Cortiglione and the woods of Val Sarmassa. Go through the Bosco Incantato wood, where you'll find a series of signs bearing poems, stories and memories of this 'enchanted' setting. This stretch of the route is around 13 km long and brings you back to its end in Vinchio.