While having a stroll in the bush or driving on spectacular Italian and Swiss highways (no, I have never had a crash...) I see the landscape covered with question marks. I inevitably wonder why those places look the way they are, what makes them so unique, what forces have shaped them. The same happens to lots of outdoorsy people, who always want to know more about the rocks they walk on, about the secret life of mountains.

With time I realised that the Italian Western Alps are not that great to show people what is really going on in this planet. Why? Well, I think around here we are simply missing the most puzzling and easy-to-read geological items: fossils. I often wonder what would have happened if I had been born in the Dolomites and I had seen a shell at 2000 meters of altitude as a kid...maybe I would have become even more of a fanatic.

Using the right research tools, however, one can extract a lot of incredible information from a "hard" rock, making the so called "crystalline" rocks of the Western Alps even more interesting than any fossil-bearing rock (I am not trying to overcome an inferiority complex, I swear).

Considerations based on the evolution of those rocks can help us understand how the Alps formed and evolved in time. This is a long story. And a fascinating one.