"The only way to get to the hut is by foot, which will take about 20 minutes,” a friend had written in a text, accompanied by a map. “There will be crampons waiting for you.”

Aside from these two sentences, she had told us little about the remote Rifugio Nambino, but I knew that it was her favorite forest “hut” — one of the traditional restaurants and inns characteristic of this mountainous region of northern Italy.