The small village of Stampa in Switzerland's Bregaglia Valley was home to one of the most celebrated artist families in modern art history. Alberto, Diego, Ottilia, and Bruno Giacometti grew up here under the loving care of their mother Annetta and the artistic guidance of their father Giovanni Giacometti. Though little in this austere mountain valley points to the famous family today, their preserved studio stands as a testament to their extraordinary legacy.

Stampa appears unremarkable to most travelers passing through this transit point between the Upper Engadin and Italy's Lake Como. The small village, little more than a collection of houses along the main road descending from the Maloja Pass toward the Italian border, rarely prompts visitors to stop. Yet this unassuming place nurtured a dynasty of artists whose influence would reach far beyond these mountain walls.

Alberto Giacometti, born in 1901 in the neighboring hamlet of Borgonovo, would become world-famous for his gaunt, towering female sculptures. His brothers Diego (1902-1985) and Bruno (1907-2012) also achieved artistic recognition - Diego for his exquisite bronze furniture now featured in a major exhibition at the Grisons Art Museum in Chur, and Bruno as a renowned Swiss architect who left his mark throughout the Bregaglia Valley. Only sister Ottilia (born 1904) achieved immortality solely through the art of her father Giovanni and brother Alberto, who painted her repeatedly until her tragic death in 1937, just hours after giving birth to her first child.

The artistic patriarch Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933), famous for his post-impressionist mountain landscapes, was born in Stampa itself. His relative Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947), also born in Stampa, is considered a Swiss pioneer of abstraction and, alongside Giovanni, Ferdinand Hodler, and Cuno Amiet, one of Switzerland's most recognized painters. Today, a Centro Giacometti founded by Marco Giacometti, a distant family relative, occupies a large house directly across from the family home and the stable that housed their studio.

Among Alberto's most profound childhood memories was a golden-colored boulder located about 800 meters from the village. This monolith, which his father had shown him when he was between four and seven years old, contained a cave at its base, hollowed out by water. The entrance was low, barely larger than the village children Alberto played with, but it widened inside to form what seemed like a second small cave at the back. "I immediately considered this stone as a friend, a being with the greatest goodwill toward us, which calls us, smiles at us like someone we once knew and loved and whom we found again with surprise and infinite joy," Alberto later wrote.

This childhood connection to stone would prove prophetic. For his father's grave in the San Giorgio cemetery between Stampa and Borgonovo, where almost all the Giacomettis found their final rest, Alberto chose a block of local granite. Inspired by Egyptian funerary art, he designed a bas-relief showing a bird, a drinking cup, the sun, and a star. His brother Diego executed the design, as Alberto, overwhelmed by grief, could not attend his father's 1933 funeral following Giovanni's death from a brain hemorrhage at age 65.

The unique light of the Bregaglia Valley profoundly influenced Alberto's artistic vision. The almost vertically rising rock walls allow hardly any sunbeam to enter for many months of the year - what brother Diego called "a kind of antechamber to hell." This sparse light bathes everything in a monochrome gray veil, which Alberto internalized and made a defining element of his painting. His portraits of his mother, wife Annette, mistress Caroline, and friends are all rendered in these characteristic gray tones that reflect his homeland's austere luminosity.

The family studio, converted from an 18th-century stable attached to the pink family house in 1906, remains preserved much as Alberto left it. The dining table lamp from Giovanni's famous 1912 painting "The Lamp" still hangs here, along with the table itself, which originally belonged to the family of Giovanni Segantini in Maloja. Even the marriage bed of Giovanni and Annetta Giacometti, an ornately carved piece from 1674 in which Alberto was born, is now displayed in the studio as an iconic family artifact.

A simple wooden stool in the studio carries particular significance as the seat where both Giovanni and Alberto sat for days, weeks, and months while painting. When Bruno Giacometti's estate was auctioned in Zurich in 2013, this stool sold for 130,000 francs to an anonymous bidder. Fortunately, it reappeared at a small Bern auction house two years ago and was purchased for 20,000 francs thanks to donations, returning it to its rightful place.

The stool's authenticity is verifiable through several details: Alberto had marked the stool's position on the wooden floor because the correct distance to his easel was fundamental and could not be moved by even a centimeter. The marks are still visible and match the stool legs perfectly. The seat bears a brand mark with Giovanni Giacometti's initials, and gray paint traces underneath show where Alberto wiped his paint-covered hands. Numerous burn marks around the stool reveal where Alberto dropped matches after lighting his countless cigarettes.

Alberto's final work, a bronze bust of French photographer Eli Lotar, is housed in the Ciäsa Granda, the local museum operated by the Società culturale di Bregaglia. When Alberto died in Chur hospital on January 11, 1966, from stomach ailments, he had been working on this bust in Paris. After Alberto's burial in Borgonovo on January 15, his brother Diego returned to Paris and had the nearly completed sculpture, wrapped in damp cloths, cast in bronze.

This bronze was initially placed on Alberto's grave but was later moved to the museum for security reasons by Bruno Giacometti. Its years of exposure to the harsh weather conditions of the Bregaglia Valley gave it a naturally beautiful, green-shimmering patina. The grave itself has suffered from theft - a bronze dove created by Diego for his brother's grave was stolen twice, once in 1978 and again in 1992, and never recovered.

After Alberto's death in January 1966, the studio passed to Diego and Bruno Giacometti. Much remains exactly as Alberto left it - his brushes, his palette with dried layers of gray oil paint, and even childhood drawings he scratched into the wooden paneling with a heated nail when he visited his father's studio after school. Bruno Giacometti bequeathed the studio building to the Società culturale di Bregaglia with the stipulation that it not become a pilgrimage site. For over thirty years, it was accessible only to art historians, but since 2016, it has been open to groups.

Throughout his life, Alberto Giacometti returned regularly to Stampa from his adopted home in Paris, drawn back as if to the maternal womb. His mother Annetta, a pillar of strength who held everything together, was perhaps the embodiment of what home meant to Alberto. She was a formidable woman who upheld strict standards of propriety - Alberto could only introduce his life partner to her after they were married. He portrayed his mother every time he returned home, and she sits in these paintings and drawings like a sphinx, mysteriously distant yet familiar in the recognizable studio setting. Today, the Bregaglia Valley remains largely unchanged, its austere beauty continuing to echo in the gray tones and elongated forms that made Alberto Giacometti's art instantly recognizable worldwide.