A stroll up Monte Terminillo and the Elephant Mountain

This time of year you can see snow-capped mountains from Rome. Monte Terminillo stood 70km away as we drove up Rome’s outer ring road, in the northeast corner of Italy’s Lazio region. It would have been a fairly innocuous bump on a mountainous horizon were it not for the snow. Now the white glaze caused it to stand out from its neighbours.

We didn’t know it was Terminillo when we first saw it, but it remained in front of us for almost our entire journey, and eventually we were certain it was...