“Vermiglio” opens by introducing viewers to the sleeping Graziadei family, just as the winter sun is rising. In one bed, three sisters sleep side by side. In another, two brothers sleep in opposite directions. A baby stirs in a crib stationed next to the father and mother, who will deliver her 10th child before the film is over.

The Alpine village of Vermiglio, Italy, is so small that the father, Cesare (Tommaso Ragno), the local teacher, instructs his own children, alongside everyone else’s, in a single classroom; he hands out their grades with a formality more suited to addressing strangers. His position gives him an extra layer of control over his offspring’s futures and an additional means of surveilling their lives. (He’ll learn from reading one of his daughters’ exercise books that another daughter has received a love note.) And the town is so cloistered that World War II, which is winding down, is more discussed than seen.

The director and writer, Maura Delpero, relays much of this narrative offhandedly; she appears more interested in giving the audience a feel for the air, the qualities of light and the tactility of the rural setting, where her father grew up and her grandfather was the schoolteacher. But to the extent that “Vermiglio,” which won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival this year, keeps its exposition indirect, that choice is an organic one.

This is, after all, a place where few people need to explain anything to anyone else. But Delpero also finds ways to subsume story to ambience; she often eases into the next scene with an unusually long overlap of dialogue before cutting to the speaking characters. The sudden illness and death of a baby is presented obliquely, because infant deaths are a fact of life in Vermiglio. And what happens when Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), the oldest of the three sisters, goes on a journey near the end requires close attention to understand.

The dominant plot thread involves a romance between Lucia and Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian deserter who catches Lucia’s eye. He is good around children. His taciturn manner, possibly related to his war service, and a language barrier — he speaks Sicilian — may add to his exotic allure. Cesare also teaches adults, and it’s in his classroom that Pietro musters the courage to ask for Lucia’s hand.

Delpero, typically, cuts away before Cesare says anything in response, but he has already described Lucia as a “mountain goat,” someone who’s destined to settle down in Vermiglio. By contrast, Cesare decides that Flavia (Anna Thaler), the youngest daughter, who has a habit of inadvertently revealing too much information to her father, is the sharpest child, worth sending to boarding school, while Ada (Rachele Potrich), the most out-of-place daughter, should be forced to stay behind. (When Cesare, in his capacity as schoolteacher, informs her that her studies have come to an end, he backhandedly praises her high marks in home economics.) Ada at one point says she wishes she could be a priest; when a priest talks, she explains, people listen.

“Vermiglio” is so devoted to evoking a time and place that much of its subtlety does not become apparent until a second viewing. It is a rich, enveloping film that asks viewers to approach it as if tiptoeing through the snow.