About a year ago, we celebrated World Environment Day with an article that described how the commitment of individuals and organizations can really make a difference in reforesting degraded environments.

Today, we are doing the same, bringing you the incredible story of Augusto Girardelli and how he transformed an entire slope of Monte Baldo. But before going into detail, let’s try to better understand where this story is set.
The Baldo mountain range was made famous by Francesco Calzolari’s 1566 work “Il viaggio di Monte Baldo” (The Journey of Monte Baldo). Thanks to Calzolari’s account, which described the rich biodiversity present in these mountains, Baldo was first referred to as the Hortus Italiae and then considered the Hortus Europae or “Garden of Europe.

If you would like to learn more, you can find the complete digitized book clicking here.

A few decades later, Giovanni Pona also wrote about the extraordinary botanical interest in the area of Monte Baldo, Lake Garda, Val Lagarina, and Verona in his work, Monte Baldo, in which many rare plants of the ancients, unknown to moderns until now, are depicted and described.
You can also find this digitized work for free on google books here.

Just think that in this area of only 300 square kilometers—about one thousandth of Italy’s surface area—there are at least 57 species of orchids, including several endemic species [1], meaning that they are found exclusively in this territory. This extraordinary concentration of life makes the region one of the richest in biodiversity not only in Italy, but in all of Europe.

Now you may also understand how special this area is, located between the political borders of Trentino and Veneto and the natural borders of Lake Garda and the Adige Valley.

But let’s get back to the main character of our story: I learned about him while walking along the path that leads from S. Giacomo to Mt. Altissimo di Nago, one of the highest peaks in the Monte Baldo mountain range, where there is a commemorative plaque in memory of Augusto Girardelli, which reads as follows:

Augusto Girardelli, a man of the mountains, devoted himself passionately to his work and family throughout his long life, but from a young age he also fell in love with this mountain: the Altissimo. Over the years, with the specific aim of protecting it from bad weather, landslides, and avalanches, he planted more than 300,000 trees on this steep and inaccessible slope. Fir, larch, and birch trees, but above all Swiss stone pine, a noble high-altitude plant, robust, strong, and tenacious, like the character of “Gusto,” who realized one of his life’s great dreams on these difficult slopes: planting trees to protect the mountain, heal its wounds, make it more beautiful and welcoming, safe, and accessible to all.

Figure 1: Commemorative plaque dedicated to Augusto Girardelli on the Cirmoli trail, which leads from San Giacomo to Mount Altissimo di Nago. Source: Author, 2025.

A project that lasted thirty years, begun in the mid-1970s and carried out with incredible determination. It covers approximately 250 hectares, from Malga Pesna to Malga Campo, practically the entire slope. Augusto Girardelli had purchased it about fifteen years earlier, with borrowed money and the proceeds from his newly opened hotel. However, there was a problem: frequent avalanches. From a practical problem came the visionary idea of reforesting the entire slope to protect the village of San Giacomo and his hotel.
Among the plants planted is the Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra), also known simply as cembro or cirmolo: a tenacious plant, but not easy to root and very slow to grow, in fact it can take up to two hundred years to reach maturity. However, once its roots take hold in the ground, they are as solid as rock.

I highly recommend watching this short video from RaiNews, where his son Elio tells the story of his father Augusto surrounded by the trees they planted.

Augusto Girardelli certainly did not plant for himself and made his love for these plants his reason for living. The fruit of his labor is visible today to all those who walk this path to the top of ‘his’ mountain, which he transformed and reforested thanks to his passion, leaving behind a forest that will live and thrive for centuries.