What is The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti about?
The Eight Mountains (Le otto montagne, 2016) is a novel about a lifelong friendship between Pietro, a boy whose family spends its summers in a village in the Valle d'Aosta, and Bruno, a local boy from a family of herders. It follows them from childhood through years apart to the moment they rebuild a ruined mountain hut together, and it is just as much about Pietro and his father. It won the Strega Prize in 2017.
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Paolo Cognetti's novel came out from Einaudi in 2016 and did something unusual for a quiet book about friendship and walking uphill: it became an international success. It won the Strega Prize and the Strega Giovani in 2017, along with the Prix Médicis étranger in France, has been translated into some 35 languages, and became a 2022 film that won the Jury Prize at Cannes.
The story
Pietro's family spends summers in Grana, a small village in the mountains of the Valle d'Aosta. There he meets Bruno, a local boy his own age, from a family who raise animals. The two spend their summers roaming the valley, the streams and the high pastures, and become inseparable in the way that only children who meet once a year can be.
Then life does what it does. They grow up and drift apart. Pietro becomes a documentary filmmaker and spends long stretches in Nepal; Bruno stays, working as a herder and builder. Pietro and his father, meanwhile, grow apart, and the distance between them is one of the book's quiet sorrows.
When his father dies, Pietro inherits a plot of high mountain land with a ruined hut on it, and he and Bruno set about rebuilding it together. That project, stone by stone, brings the friendship back into focus, and the rest of the novel follows where their two very different lives take them. We will stop there.
The title
The eight mountains come from a Buddhist and Indian picture of the world: eight mountain ranges surrounding a central peak. The image hangs over a story about two men, one who keeps travelling and one who stays put, and it quietly asks which of them has seen more.
What the book is really about
- Friendship between men, of the unspoken, practical kind, built on shared work and long silences.
- Fathers and sons, and how much of a parent you only understand after they are gone.
- The mountains, not as scenery but as a way of living, with all the hardship that brings. The book contrasts generations too: the father's classic alpinism and Pietro's restless travel.
- Growing up. It is a coming-of-age novel that keeps going well past the coming of age.
Who will love it
- People who walk, hike or climb, or who have spent childhood summers in the mountains.
- Readers who like spare, unhurried writing and do not need much plot.
- Anyone with a friend they see rarely but count as one of their closest.
- Anyone with a complicated, loving relationship with a parent.
If you want a big dramatic story, it may feel too quiet. If you want a book to read on a hut terrace after a long day, it is ideal. And if it makes you want to go uphill yourself, our guide to a first hike in the Dolomites is a gentle place to start.
FAQ
Is the book better than the film?
They are different pleasures. The 2022 film, directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, with Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi, is long, beautiful and patient. The book gives you more time inside the friendship, which is where much of the feeling lives. Read it first if you can.
Is The Eight Mountains a true story?
It is a novel, not a memoir. The Valle d'Aosta setting is real; the characters and their story are fiction.
Is it sad?
It is moving, and there is real loss in it. But it is also full of light, summers, friendship and work done well. Most readers come away more grateful than gloomy.
Is it a good book for learning Italian?
For an intermediate reader, yes: the sentences are clear and the vocabulary is concrete, mountains, animals, building and weather. Having read it in English first helps.
Sources
Written by the Zestasy editors. General information for curious adults, not medical, nutrition or training advice.