The Giacometti Trail

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1, 6, 7, 11, 16, 17, 26 - future points of interest

2 Ca d'Baldin
The Giacomettis sometimes came to own a house through an inheritance. In 1909, for example, Giovanni Giacometti's wife Annetta received a house and a stable in Capolago on Lake Sils from her uncle Rodolfo Baldini, who lived in this house. This became the second home of the family of painters. The Baldinis, who had originally come to Borgonovo from Italy, were successful emigrants in Marseille and therefore owned large estates in Bergell, in addition to several houses. In the local Ca d'Baldin, built by Bartolomeo Baldini (1811-1864), the later constitutional law teacher Zaccaria and his brother Cornelio Giacometti also grew up after 1897. Both were born in Stampa and lost their father and mother at an early age. After 1934 and until her death in 1963, the painter and weaver Elvezia Michel (1887-1963), daughter of a cousin of Annetta Giacometti-Stampa, who had already spent a lot of time in Borgonovo before moving here, also lived here.

3 Baldini/Stampa House
Alberto's mother Annetta (1871-1964) was a daughter of Domenica Baldini, who died young and left behind four small children. She was the second wife of the teacher Giovanni Stampa (1834-1913), who had grown up in Palü near Stampa. Initially working as a primary school teacher, he was married in his first marriage to Matilde Lechner, who died young. After his second marriage to Domenica Baldini, Giovanni Stampa moved into this house as a teacher. He kept bees in the garden. For a few years he even worked in the pastry shop of her relatives in Marseille during his time off from school. As a very good connoisseur of botany, geology and the history of the Bergell, Giovanni Stampa was elected the first senior school teacher in the Bergell in 1876. The school was located in a house at the entrance to the village of Borgonovo. He also taught his pupils drawing, among them Giovanni Giacometti. The latter's son Alberto enjoyed the educated environment of his grandfather until the age of 12.

4 Ca d'Dolf, Alberto's birthplace
Like many people from Bergell, members of the Dolfi family from Borgonovo also found work abroad. Some of the Dolfi emigrated to Trieste from 1800 onwards, but retained a close connection to Bergell. This house, owned by Tommaso and Caterina Dolfi around 1850, bears witness to this. One of the flats was rented by the newlyweds Giovanni and Annetta Giacometti-Stampa from 1900 to 1904. The bride only had to cross the street to move in... The first three of their four children were also born here: Alberto in 1901, Diego in 1902 and Ottilia in 1904. Father Giovanni, as yet without a studio of his own, created numerous landscapes of Borgonovo as well as scenes of his young family during those four years. In October 1904 the family moved on to Stampa.

5 Ca d'Baldin di Molin
The house was built in 1666 by the notary Giovanni Baldini (1642-1717) and his wife Caterina Dolfi. They were descendants of a widely branched and successful dynasty: among them were notaries, confiseurs, pharmacists, doctors, bankers or even artists. The doctor Augusto Baldini (1840-1918), who for a time owned the house that is still in its original condition, commissioned Augusto Giacometti in 1907 to paint a large-scale, symbolist painting for his newly built holiday home in Orden near Maloja. This was followed in 1908 by a commission for the sgraffito on the west façade of this house, which is still preserved today. In 1909, his daughter Anna Baldini (1876-1936) inspired Augusto to paint his very first non-representational portrait, an abstract colour composition in shades of blue.

House Del Bondio, former Bergell district secondary school
This building was built in several stages by Pietro Del Bondio (1837-1915), an immigrant from Chiavenna. The first part, dated 1880, also served as a restaurant and carpentry workshop. Del Bondio had taken part in the Thousand Train in Sicily in 1860 under Giuseppe Garibaldi. He named his second son, who also worked here as a carpenter, Pietro Garibaldi (1871-1957). Both painters, Giovanni and Augusto Giacometti, had the Del Bondios make frames and transport boxes for their paintings. The ground floor of this house housed the district secondary school where Alberto's grandfather Giovanni Stampa taught until 1903. School drawings by some of Alberto's father Giovanni Giacometti's siblings from this period have survived and are very good. Of the young Giovanni Giacometti, Giovanni Stampa published an essay on a Bergell singing festival in 1882. In 1894 Augusto Giacometti was also taught by Giovanni Stampa at this school for two months.

8 San Giorgio, church and cemetery
A church stood on this site - directly on the old road through the Bergell, in open countryside - as early as 1327. It was not until after the Reformation in 1694 that this late Baroque church with a steeple was built. Three tombstones of great historical importance have been preserved in the interior, commemorating representatives of the Stampa, Salis and Redolfi families. On the outside walls and the cemetery walls are gravestones of other Reformed patricians of Stampa and Borgonovo, such as the Santi, Baldini, Dolfi, Fasciati, Silvestri or Giacometti families. The special cultural situation of the Italian-speaking and Reformed inhabitants had an effect on the local marriage policy for centuries: people married among their own kind. At the end of the 19th century, Catholic families who had immigrated from Italy settled here. The cemetery also contains the graves of all the Giacometti artists and some of their ancestors, such as Giovanni Giacometti's parents, Alberto and Caterina Ottilia née Santi, or Annetta's parents, Giovanni Stampa and Domenica née Baldini. The stele at Giovanni's grave, inspired by Egyptian funerary art, was created by his son Alberto around 1935, and the memorial plaque on Alberto's grave is preserved by Diego. In 1935, Augusto Giacometti donated the window Christ's Entry into Jerusalem to the parish, on the lower left edge of which he immortalised the names of his parents, Giacomo Giacometti and Emilia née Stampa.

9 Forest and clearing
In the course of the year, the forest performs a concert of colours that captivated Giovanni and Augusto Giacometti and is reflected in their painting. Although the east-west orientation of the valley and the steep mountain slopes near Stampa result in a winter period of three months without direct sunlight, they also lead to different tree diversity: while here, on the sunny southern slope, the deciduous forest grows up to 1500 metres above sea level, the coniferous forest on the shady northern slope reaches down to the valley floor. Forest and meadows combine to form a pattern of clearings and dark stretches, as can be observed behind the church of San Giorgio. A clearing at the edge of the forest exerted a special attraction on Alberto, and something of this image found expression in The Forest Clearance. The composition with 7 figures and a head (The Forest) reminded him of "a patch of woodland that I saw over and over again for many years during my childhood" and whose "trees, with bare trunks almost bare to the top, always looked like people who had stopped and were talking". In the larch-covered pasture, the boys of Stampa herded the cattle in spring and autumn. Augusto Giacometti recalled: "And how the forest impressed me when I was there alone. The larches seemed dizzyingly high. They stood rigidly upright and only the tops moved." In the forest he felt joy and at the same time fear and cluelessness overcame him: "Even today, when I read descriptions of immensely large forests in Argentina or India, I involuntarily think of the forest above Stampa." Alberto, for his part, thought of Siberia when he saw the infinity of space.

10 Huge black stone
In his surrealist period, Alberto Giacometti recalled, "As a child (between the ages of 4 and 7), I saw of the outside world only those things that were likely to give me pleasure. These were mainly stones and trees, and rarely more than one object at a time." Stones found in the Bergell landscape, which have fallen down from the mountain flanks over the centuries, exert a magical attraction on many a child, probably more so in the past than today. They were favourite playgrounds. Augusto Giacometti, for example, had a magic stone as a child. And Alberto once discovered a huge black stone on a hill in the middle of the undergrowth. The boulder appeared to him as a being with a dangerous seductive power: "This rock immediately had an effect on me like a living being, like a hostile, threatening being. It threatened everything - us, our games and our cave." Possibly that rock was this black one up here in the little meadow. So in this place we can imagine Alberto touching his huge black stone "reluctantly and fearfully, fleetingly with his hand."

Golden monolith
The boulder of reddish Bündner slate a few metres above the road fell long ago from the face of the Piz Duan and dug itself deep into the earth here. A small cave was created in the front. For Alberto and some friends, including his brother Diego, it became a favourite playground. His father Giovanni had shown Alberto this rock and he remembered: "It was a monolith of golden colour that opened into a cave at the bottom; the whole lower part was hollow, the water had washed it out. [...] Immediately I regarded it as a friend, as a being who was well-disposed towards us, who called to us and smiled at us like someone you once knew and loved, and whom you are surprised and overjoyed to find again." Psychologists interpret the vision of the two stones, the golden monolith and the black stone, with the experience of the adolescent who rediscovers in the cave the figure of the mother, and in the other the male competitor who must be defeated.

12 Samarovan Schoolhouse by Bruno Giacometti
Samarovan is the agriculturally used sun terrace on the other side of the valley from Stampa. The farmers of that time cleared the meadows of the stones lying around and piled them up in heaps, the so-called "musna". Children played on them, among them Alberto and Diego Giacometti. With new funding after the successful commissioning of the power plants of the city of Zurich, the municipality of Stampa commissioned the architect Bruno Giacometti to build the schoolhouse between 1961-1963. He planned to build the schoolhouse from the rock piles in the nearby meadows and placed a rectangular stone trough in the centre of the building as the core of such a "musna". The central staircase, whose floor surface is covered with red clinker, is framed across all floors by a free-standing quarry stone wall. Six classrooms, the staircase and the gymnasium with stage are united under asymmetrically rising roof surfaces. Originally, the building served as a primary and secondary school for Stampa and the associated hamlets. In 1972, Bergell began centralising its school operations. Today, the Samarovan school building serves the entire valley as a secondary school. An average of twelve pupils learn here per year. The primary schools are located in Vicosoprano and Maloja.

13 Bergell mountains
The special feature of the Bergell mountains is the rugged, deep grey mountains in the south, about which Rudolf Staub once wrote : "As a mighty intrusive mass, the granite of the Forno-Albigna-Bondasca group rises to form a rocky mountain range of unparalleled boldness, whose needles and walls, towers and jags, slabs and gorges are unparalleled in their unbridled wildness in the entire Alps." For Giovanni Segantini and Giovanni Giacometti, it was precisely these peaks that formed the basis of their painting beginnings - grandiose nature instead of academic theory. The biographer Reinhold Hohl is also reminded by some busts by Alberto Giacometti from 1954 of the granite peaks with the furrowed, massive torsos and the small heads rapt in space: they look like the curved rounded mountain flanks crowned by narrow summit rocks in an unreachable distance. In the eastern Bergell are the greenish mountains of the Disgrazia-Serpentine, and to the north and west of them the stacked Pennine and East Alpine blankets, with a great colourful variety of layered rocks. The local mountain, Piz Duan, to the north of the valley loomed over the artists throughout their lives. All these mountains were artistically transformed by the Giacometti painters. Narrowness, steepness and mightiness emanated from them, while the view opens up to the west. In February 1963, Alberto noted in Stampa: "Start again from zero with everything, the way I see people and things, especially people and their heads, the eyes on the horizon, the curved eye line, the watershed." And further, on his certainty of the eternal: "Relativity of all things and the mountains in Stampa? They are there and will remain."

14 Palazzo Castelmur
The present Palazzo Castelmur with its English garden was originally a bourgeois house of considerable size built in 1723 with two flats on the first (ground) floor and a stately flat on the second floor. It belonged to the Redolfi family, who became wealthy in Venice. When Napoleon assigned the Valtellina to the newly founded Cisalpine Republic, the Redolfis increasingly lost their livelihood, forcing them to sell their ancestral home. Baron Giovanni de Castelmur and his wife Anna bought the estate in 1820 and extended it between 1850 and 1854 with two distinctive towers according to plans by Giovanni Crassi Marliani. As a child, Augusto Giacometti observed its glass door at the end of the corridor from the outside: "I often looked into the black corridor - and it always seemed to me as if, back there, by the blue, some miracle was in the making." Alberto Giacometti was also impressed by the magnificent building; he wrote to his friend Lucas Lichtenhan in April 1919: "In our municipality there is a village with a beautiful square surrounded by white houses... On one side there is a large, high house with two towers at the back, which belongs to a baron from Bergell who lives in Lyon. I will buy this beautiful house and paint it white, and live there; then I will invite you to stay with me. As we know, this was not to happen. Today Castelmur Castle serves the municipality of Bregaglia as a residential museum.

15 La Mota / San Pietro
This exposed hilltop, La Mota, interspersed with massive stone blocks, is the result of a post-glacial landslide. At the southern foot of the hill, facing the river Maira, Augusto liked to paint water and flowers and called this place "paradise". On the south-western slope, the municipality of Stampa built a small hydroelectric power station in 1921, with Giovanni Giacometti's political participation, which was operated until the 1950s and whose ruins can still be seen. On the plateau there is a settlement complex of the younger Iron Age, which included a few residential and perhaps also storage buildings. Several exploratory excavations produced numerous objects, including a bronze brooch, ceramic fragments and a Roman spindle whorl from Lavez. The existing reformed church of San Pietro and the church tower were built in 1743. The painting On the Morning of the Resurrection was created by Augusto Giacometti in Florence in 1914-1915. In the cemetery of San Pietro there are gravestones of other patrician families of Stampa, Coltura, Montaccio and Caccior, such as the Castelmur, Crüzer and Gianotti.

18 House of Stampa / Giacometti da la Palü
In the 19th century, there were three modest dwellings, three stables, a tannery, a sawmill and a mill in the Palü district. In contrast to the mill, this house built on rocks defied the floods of the Maira, which overflowed its banks, in 1927. Four of the buildings had to make way for a wider cantonal road between 1961 and 1970. Members of the Stampa family lived here for generations, including Giovanni Stampa (1765-1823). Two of his sons, Agostino and Rodolfo, emigrated to Prussia, to Thorn and Wloclawek respectively. Another son, Antonio (1808-1893), called Tunin da la Palü, served as notary in this house. He had seven children, among them the later teacher Giovanni Stampa (1834-1913) and Maria (1837-1901), who took over the family house. She married Giacomo Giacometti from Caccior and founded the Giacometti da la Palü line with her five children. Their son Antonio moved to Rome and ran a confectionery on the Via Nazionale. There he hosted the young Alberto Giacometti for almost a year in 1921. Alberto asked Antonio's daughter Bianca to be his model and fell unhappily in love with her.

19 Villa nuova
Agostino Stampa (1802-1877), who grew up here in Palü in the Stampa house, emigrated to Prussia as a young man and ran a confectionery in Thorn for a few decades. In 1848 he married Emilia Meng (1827-1867) from Castasegna, who accompanied him there. She was 21 years old at the time, her husband 25 years older. Augusto's mother, Marta Stampa (1853-1928), was born the fourth of Agostino and Emilia's eleven children. She spent her early years in Prussia with her siblings, and they spoke German at school. Agostino returned with his large family to the place of his childhood, where he built this house in 1860: it exemplifies the return of a Bergell emigrant who was able to realise his dreams in his homeland with the money he had saved abroad. In 1863, after the birth of her tenth child, Emilia Stampa wrote in her church hymnbook in this house: "If it pleases God, he will be the last." In 1867, she suffered a stillbirth with her eleventh child and succumbed to it herself at the age of only 40. A plaque in memory of Emilia and Agostino Stampa is preserved in the cemetery of San Giorgio. Augusto's uncle Cristiano, who painted himself, also lived in this house until around 1885. His watercolour painting box was later given to Augusto.

20 La Ruina / Augusto and Zaccaria's Parental Home
This two-part house was known as La Ruina, or the Broken House. It had probably remained uninhabited for some time before the arrival of the first Giacomettis. The house had been built by the Stampa family. The front building is dated 1602, the rear part with its old kitchen and the wood-panelled living and sleeping rooms on the first floor is probably older. La Ruina originally housed carters who travelled over the Bergell passes. The entrance hall on the ground floor was used to store goods, and the stable for the draught animals was located in the rear, eastern part of the house. Augusto's parents, Giacomo Giacometti da la Gassa (1853-1918) and Marta née Stampa, moved into La Ruina immediately after their marriage in 1876. They occupied the first floor with a parlour, a kitchen and a bedroom in the western part of the house and used other rooms in the eastern part of the house, where Augusto, born in 1877, later also set up a small studio. Just two years after his parents moved in, Augusto's uncle Zaccaria Giacometti (1856-1897) married the teacher's daughter Cornelia Stampa from Borgonovo. The couple moved into the second floor of the house and lived there until Zaccaria's early death in 1897. So Zaccaria Giacometti junior, who later became a professor of constitutional law at the University of Zurich, was also born in La Ruina. After Augusto's death in 1947, his cousin Antonio (1890-1972) owned the house.

21 Stampa House / Giacometti da la Gassa
Augusto's paternal grandmother, Maria Stampa (1823-1907), was the only surviving child of six siblings, and so she brought the family's ancestral home, probably built in 1578 by Podestà Dionisius Stampa, into her marriage with Antonio Giacometti (1814-1883). For several generations, male members of this branch of the family were potentates of the Bergell. Maria Stampa was decidedly devout, and it was said that in her old age she often cried out at the open window, Psalms in hand: "I am a saint, leave my house, you devilish souls!" Her husband had come from Montaccio and had worked as a young journeyman in a confectioner's shop in Modena. He returned home in 1849. A narrow lane led past the house and gave the local Stampas their nickname da la Gassa, which the descendants of Antonio and Maria Giacometti also bore from then on. With his wife he had three sons - Giacomo, Zaccaria and Antonio - and a daughter Caterina. They all found a new home elsewhere and the house on the lane was sold in 1907 after Maria's death to Giovanni Merlo, who had immigrated from nearby Italy.

22 The Maira and the Stampa Bridge
The Maira rises behind the Piz Duan in the Val Maroz. At Casaccia it bends 180 degrees around the Piz Lizun, takes in the Orlegna from the Fornotal and flows through Bergell to Chiavenna and on to Lake Como. In 1933, Alberto wrote of the "rush of the stream flowing over living and precious pebbles". In the past, various floods damaged traffic routes, settlements and cultivated land. This was also the case in September 1927, when here in Stampa the Mulin district largely disappeared and the northern façade of the Hotel Piz Duan collapsed. Today, this danger has largely been averted; part of the Maira's water flows from Löbbia in a mountain tunnel at 1400 metres above sea level to then plunge down in Castasegna and drive the electric generators of the power station there. This bridge over the Maira was built in 1699 by the municipality of Sopraporta under Nicolò Salis; apparently the Salis family also played an important role in Stampa in the 16th century. In the church of San Giorgio, a tombstone refers to Theodosius Salis, who died in 1596. For centuries, the shortest footpath to Soglio led over this bridge via Coltura, Caccior and La Plota. Giovanni Giacometti painted the bridge next to his childhood home several times from different perspectives, including in 1904 immediately after his return from Borgonovo. Two years later, Augusto Giacometti found his inspiration for his painting Contemplazione here, looking east.

23 House Giacometti dal Punt, Hotel Piz Duan
Giovanni Giacometti's birthplace was probably built by Theodosius von Salis in 1586 and sold by Antonio Salis to Dorigo Santi in 1666. Like the twin building Ca d'Durig on the other side of the street, the house on the bridge originally served as a warehouse for the transport of goods. Caterina Ottilia Santi (1838-1904), daughter of the owner, married Alberto Giacometti in 1863, a native of Caccior who had worked as a confectioner in Warsaw in his younger years. The couple stayed in Bergamo for a few years before taking over the business of Giovanni Dorigo Santi (1792-1864) in 1865. From then on they worked here as traders, postmen and farmers. As founders of the Giacometti dal Punt line, Alberto and Caterina Ottilia had eight children, including Giovanni and Otto (1883-1925). The latter took over the family home. Between 1885 and 1887, Alberto extended the attached stable into the Hotel Piz Duan and got into debt. Nevertheless, he allowed the young Giovanni to study in Munich and Paris. Father Alberto, who was known as tough and lean, attentive, obliging and friendly, was interested in his son's painting and also in Cuno Amiet, who stayed in Stampa in the summer of 1890. Giovanni Giacometti lived in the house on the bridge until his marriage to Annetta Stampa from Borgonovo in 1900. From 1904 to 1906 he returned here once again for a transitional period with his wife and their young children Alberto, Diego and Ottilia. Under the management of various family members and tenants, the house fulfilled important functions for the public for many years: as a hotel, restaurant, grocery shop, dance hall, theatre hall, post office, telegraph and telephone base, and later also as a telephone exchange and tourist information centre. In 1912 Otto installed gas lighting. Augusto Giacometti often dined here during his last stays in his native village. When Alberto was in Stampa, he visited the bar in his father's parents' house every day, and his wife Annette stayed in their blue room on the second floor on and off for several years. Today it serves as a residence and houses the Centro Giacometti.

Stampa House / Residence of Giovanni Giacometti's Family
This house with two identical flats was built by the notary Giovanni Bortolo Stampa (1725-1802) in 1755. It was a point of reference for Augusto because his aunt Caterina Soldani and her family lived on the second floor and ran a grocery shop here, as did her daughter Savina later. But the house is particularly significant because Giovanni Giacometti moved in here in 1906 with Annetta, Alberto, Diego and Ottilia. After his time in Borgonovo, he would have liked to live in Soglio, but this did not happen. Instead they found a place to live in Stampa and on 25 October 1905 Giovanni wrote to his friend Cuno Amiet: "We have solved the problem of the studio in one fell swoop. Or rather, chance solved it for us. Perhaps you remember the red house in Stampa facing our garden and the stable opposite the Hotel Piz Duan." Both could be bought at auction by Giovanni's brother Otto Giacometti for Fr. 7,600. "We have decided to move into the house. The stable is to become a very beautiful studio." Giovanni immediately had a stove bench with clock and stove top installed in the new living room, which he carved himself. At the stove he painted Annetta with a washing basket and Ottilia with flowers, next to them women bleaching laundry and a man with apples. At the end of 1912, when a gas lamp lit the parlour for the first time, Giovanni painted a major work with his family sitting around the parlour table under the lamp, which now included his son Bruno, born in 1908. This lamp and the gas meter in the old Hotel Piz Duan are still preserved today. In the house, Alberto created many drawings and paintings with family members and interiors. He himself was also photographed several times in this parental home. It was here that Alberto discovered his environment as a child and later recalled: "... at the same time I see my whole past and myself in it before me: in Stampa at the window, around 1914, concentrating on drawing a Japanese woodcut [...]." In Goethe's words, one can still feel in this house the dignity that special people give to the place they once entered.

25 Giovanni and Alberto Giacometti Studio
Until 1906, this building was one of several stables in the centre of the village of Stampa: this was usually where the hay was stored for feeding the cattle that were kept in the stable during the winter. Giovanni converted it into his first studio in 1906: "I will have a beautiful, sunny room," the artist wrote. The conversion for this single 5m x 8m room was completed at the end of October for less than Fr. 1'000. Giovanni furnished the space, installed lighting and heating and remarked, "It is a pleasure to work in. I have enough space, light and warmth. The stove is excellent." In 1907 he invested in a printing press, with which he henceforth executed works on paper. In 1912, gas lighting was added. In the studio at that time there were also chairs by Carlo Bugatti with movable backrests. His children and his wife Annetta often sat here as models for Giovanni. Bruno recalled: "My father's studio was quite large. In the afternoon, my mother would sit in a corner and be busy with needlework while my father painted." Giovanni introduced Alberto to painting: "We have to highly value what Alberto learned as a painter from his father," said biographer Reinhold Hohl. After Giovanni's death in 1933, his studio remained temporarily unused, because Alberto preferred to work in Capolago on Lake Sils during his stays in Bergell until 1950. Only later did he discover his father's studio for himself and from then on created sculptures and paintings here. Many photos and film footage illustrate this. On the occasion of a long stay in Stampa in 1963, Alberto had a bedroom with a bathroom installed in the southern part of the studio for his wife Annette and replaced the stove. Alberto still came to Stampa in the summer of 1965 before leaving his home village for the last time on 19 August 1965. After his death on 11 January 1966 in the cantonal hospital in Chur, Alberto's body was laid out in the studio until the funeral day on 15 January 1966. The works by Giovanni and Alberto that were in the house and studio at that time are no longer in Bergell. The studio itself was donated to the Società culturale di Bregaglia by Bruno Giacometti and her sister Ottilia's son Silvio Berthoud after Diego's death. It is the only original preserved workroom of Giovanni and Alberto.

27 Caderdolf House
This is the oldest surviving building in Stampa and was probably built in the course of the 15th century. At that time Johannes Stampa, notary and bailiff of the Bergell, lived here. Both houses originally belonged to the Stampa family, and the Gianotti, Fasciati, Redolfi, Feretti and Persenico families later became the owners of parts of the house. The latter in particular was to become a point of reference for Giovanni Giacometti's family. Giovanni Persenico (1858-1942) farmed the Giacomettis' meadows both in the valley and in Maloja. Annetta was the godmother of Persenico's son Giovanni, and for several years their daughter Erminia worked as a maid in the Giacometti house. The children of the Persenicos and the Giacomettis went to school together and played together. Several times Giovanni Giacometti painted the bearded Giovanni Persenico and his children. Alberto also portrayed both his father and his playmate Giovanni Persenico. Incidentally, these examples provide a very concrete illustration of Giovanni Giacometti's role as teacher to his still young son Alberto.

28 Former primary school building in Stampa
The school history of Stampa goes back a long way. After the Reformation around 1550, Italian priests taught in public schools in the Upper Bergell. There is documentation of schooling in 1777 in the hamlets of Montaccio, Coltura, Stampa and Borgonovo. A peculiarity of Bergell: emigrant families prepared their children for a business career abroad. This building, originally built in 1670 as a parish residence and room for church services, served as a primary school building for the public school from the middle of the 19th century. Initially, however, there were no children from Borgonovo who received private lessons there. At first, some parents were sceptical about the school, because their children were indispensable helpers for the small farms, for example as shepherds. All the future artists of the Giacometti family also went to school in this house for six years. Augusto recalled: "I liked drawing and singing best. For a whole afternoon you only had these two subjects. I was in paradise." At that time, Augusto's uncle Zaccaria Giacometti taught drawing in all classes. A little later, Alberto drew Roman battle scenes and biblical landscapes here with coloured pencils. Since 1963, classes have been held in the schoolhouse built by Bruno Giacometti on the other side of the Maira River.