The rotor thumps through the thin Lombardy air and, for a moment, the world shrinks to the rounded window and a ring of silver sky. You lift from the Valle Camonica helipad and the valley peels away beneath you — a carved spine of terraces, rivers that dare you to follow them and villages clinging to hairline roads. Mount Concarena rises like a green tooth; beyond it the Orobic Alps unfold in serrated layers. To the west, Franciacorta’s ordered vineyards give way to the blue kidney of Lake Iseo; higher still, the Adamello Glacier holds old ice and new fractures of blue.