A Distant Connection: Thomas Pynchon and the Brembana Valley

After his debut novel, V. (1963), Thomas Pynchon, the writer known for his Bugs Bunny–like protruding tooth, wrote a book just as intricate as the first, though much shorter: The Crying of Lot 49. Published in 1966, it tells the story of a young woman with a peculiar Sophoclean name: Oedipa. Oedipa Maas tries to unravel a conspiracy linked to a stamp album inherited from her deceased ex-husband, a wealthy California real estate tycoon. The mystery of the stamps, which Oedipa never fully solves, revolves around a secret conflict between two postal services—a rivalry emblematic of the struggle between good and evil, power and counter-power, culture and counterculture.

I first read Pynchon’s novel in the late 1990s, in the e/o edition. Thanks to authors like Pynchon and Philip K. Dick, I learned as a young man to flirt with paranoia. Those were the days of still-shaky internet connections, the first encounters between mouse and hand, learning to use emoticons and new symbols like @, and email providers like Yahoo! and Hotmail.

One afternoon in March 2025, I took a short trip on a mostly empty bus. There was just me, the driver, a couple of ladies absorbed in their phones, and a teenager holding a bunch of mimosas. I had a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 and was bound for a location in Val Brembana, near Bergamo, somehow connected to Pynchon’s novel and the conflict between the postal services. Amid the whirlwind of images and stories in The Crying of Lot 49, a subtle trail pointed directly to a small village nestled in the Bergamasque Alps, an hour and a half’s drive from Milan: Cornello dei Tasso.

To reach Cornello dei Tasso, one ascends the provincial road from Bergamo toward Valtellina, skirting the Brembo River and weaving through the cement-lined Val Brembana. This road, traveled by locals and a constant flow of trucks and semitrailers, winds past modest villas, furniture factories, warehouses, and industrial plants, at one point overlooking the reinforced concrete arches of the San Pellegrino Flagship Factory. After an hour’s journey, you arrive at Camerata Cornello, from whence a forest path leads upward. Less than half an hour’s walk through serene silence brings you to the medieval village of Cornello dei Tasso, a cluster of stone houses and narrow streets perched on the hillside.

Behind the conspiracies and mysteries that Pynchon weaves into The Crying of Lot 49 lies a historical origin rooted precisely here, in this ancient village. When Oedipa Maas receives her inheritance, she is engaged to a disc jockey. It is mid-1960s California. At this point, Pynchon, a twenty-nine-year-old born and raised in New York, had moved to California. Three years after Kennedy’s assassination and just before the Summer of Love, California—and particularly San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury—is buzzing with mystics, protesters, outlaws, psychonauts, and students seeking new connections between different branches of knowledge. They are in search of god, nirvana, pleasure, and new ways to communicate, including telepathy. LSD, marijuana, and amphetamines are widespread. Among the novel’s characters are The Paranoids, a rock band, and a corporate executive fired due to automation—an astutely prophetic mention by Pynchon, who dedicated just one line to him, but was seeing far ahead. In bars filled with “oscillators, contact microphones, cannon devices,” one listens to the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and the sounds of Radio Cologne, the famous laboratory for electronic music established in that city in 1953.

Pynchon’s book, with its digressions, sudden shifts, stories within stories, and mixing of high culture and pop references, exemplifies postmodern style as much as it reflects a psychedelic imagination delighted by inventing narrative fractals upon fractals. The irony, innocence, and comic plasticity that characterize the dialogue and gestures of his characters recall the psychology and curvilinear design of Hanna-Barbera cartoon protagonists, very popular in US television at the time. Of certain Pynchon characters, one can affirm what is sometimes said of certain human beings: they seem like a cartoon. In this rich, colorful, and eclectic setting, Pynchon creates an atmosphere of expectation, mystery, enigma, and paranoia. Oedipa gradually pieces together the puzzle, becoming suspicious of what hides behind a stylized drawing—a kind of trumpet silenced by a mute. She sees the muted trumpet everywhere, becoming obsessed with it. This trumpet seems to be the symbol of the Tristero, an alternative postal service battling against the official postal system—a centuries-old conflict originating when postal systems in old Europe were controlled by the noble Thurn und Taxis family. This connection brings us directly to Bergamo, to Val Brembana, and to Cornello dei Tasso.

The German family of Thurn und Taxis still exists today. It is rich, powerful, and influential. One of its most talked-about figures, Princess Gloria Thurn und Taxis, was an eccentric young woman with teased hair in the 1980s, a businesswoman in the 1990s, and today a friend of Steve Bannon and the German far right. The family’s history has even inspired a board game called Thurn und Taxis, where players build competing networks of post offices across Bavarian cities. But before the Thurn und Taxis, there were the Tassos. In fact, the Thurn und Taxis are direct descendants of the Tasso family, originally from the village of Cornello dei Tasso.

In the thirteenth century, Cornello dei Tasso was a bustling mercantile center, complete with taverns and inns. It was located along the Via Mercatorum, a mule track used to transport goods on donkeys and horses between Bergamo, Val Brembana, and Valtellina. The short porticoed street that crosses the village, sheltering from wind and rain with its stone arches, beamed ceilings, and cobblestone paving, is what remains of the vitality and animation that characterized daily village life in medieval times. The Tasso family is the same family of enterprising mountain people from which descended Torquato Tasso of Jerusalem Delivered (1581), but above all, it is the clan credited with inventing the first postal system. According to tradition handed down over time—though not supported by documents—a certain Omodeo Tasso, who died in 1290, founded it. Pynchon mentions him fleetingly in one line as Omedio Tassis: “Omedio Tassis, banished from Milan, organized his first courier services in the Bergamo region around 1290.”

The system organized by the Tassos involved distributing multiple stations across the territory, each with a fully equipped stable where horses rested, ready to replace the exhausted ones returning from hours of travel. In the saddle, naturally, sat the courier, often a healthy man with a robust physique. Beyond the physical fatigue, the courier probably experienced long moments of solitude, completely immersed in nature and the silence of the landscape. We can only imagine the effects of this experience on his thoughts and inner life. Over time, horses were replaced by carriages, and stations added supplementary services, for instance blacksmith shops. The Tassos gradually organized an efficient postal service for the Republic of Venice. Later they managed papal posts and worked for princes and emperors, eventually becoming linked to the Habsburgs. Starting in 1489, Janetto dei Tassis (in documents, the names Tasso and Tassis are treated as interchangeable) served as postmaster for Maximilian I of Habsburg. Francesco Tasso was charged with administering postal traffic between Brussels and Spain. The Tassos became increasingly powerful and established themselves north of the Alps. A descendant, aiming to acquire aristocratic status, somehow managed to demonstrate a distant ancestry from the noble Milanese family Della Torre. Thus was born the house of Tasso della Torre, later Germanized in 1650 to Thurn und Taxis.

Today, only twenty people live in Cornello dei Tasso. The village is isolated, accessible only on foot. A small two-floor museum is dedicated to the history of the Tassos and the postal service, with windows offering beautiful views of the surrounding woods. Like Oedipa Maas, museum visitors repeatedly encounter the postal horn—secret symbol of the Tristero and an instrument once used by couriers to announce their arrival. The postal horn appears in the Tasso family coat of arms and also in an old, flaking fresco on the facade of a house in Cornello dei Tasso. It is precisely this venerable postal horn that the Tristero drawing references with hostile and parodic intention—an ante litteram ironic appropriation of a coat of arms, of a brand. Pynchon attributes such importance to the Tristero symbol that he reproduces its image within the novel. From that moment, the little drawing begins to appear everywhere, beneath Oedipa’s disoriented gaze:

Through an open doorway, on the stair leading up into the disinfectant-smelling twilight of a rooming house she saw an old man huddled, shaking with grief she couldn’t hear. Both hands, smoke-white, covered his face. On the back of the left hand she made out the post horn, tattooed in old ink now beginning to blur and spread. Fascinated, she came into the shadows and ascended creaking steps, hesitating on each one.¹

Walking through tiny Cornello dei Tasso, visiting the museum and then the stunning church, a memory resurfaced: Years ago, somewhere I can’t recall, I briefly spoke with someone (a man or a woman? I don’t remember) who had the Tristero symbol tattooed on the inside of their forearm. I asked, “That’s the Tristero, right?”

On the walls of the trattoria in Cornello dei Tasso, which fills with day-trippers on Saturdays, hang black-and-white photographs of the village from the 1960s and 1970s. One shows an arch and a stone wall—all that remains of the old Tasso house, just steps from the trattoria. In another room hangs a splendid full-length portrait of Harlequin, who, according to tradition, was originally a certain Zanni born in Oneta, another cluster of houses along the Via Mercatorum. As an adult, Zanni went to Venice to serve in wealthy households, and his cheerful and somewhat rustic ways made him the Harlequin of the commedia dell’arte. In a small frame behind the table where I lunch, a postcard is displayed, sent some years ago and signed by a baron of the Thurn und Taxis family.

It’s somewhat breathtaking to think that this place, among old medieval walls and moss-covered stones in the province of Bergamo, provided Thomas Pynchon with the historical material to write a significant novel of postmodern literature. Three years after The Crying of Lot 49 was published, Arpanet—the internet’s ancestor—was born from a connection between two computers in California. Today, the postal horn that once appeared in the Tasso coat of arms has become a simple WhatsApp emoji.